In Politics, Discourse, and American Society, some of the nation's best young scholars take us beyond conventional perspectives to present original work on how politics is transacted in American society and how public communication affects those transactions. They also lay out directions for future research, thereby putting fresh ideas on the scholarly agenda. The authors ask whether the American president is genuinely powerful, if lawsuits have become a way of changing the nation's politics, whether public opinion polling is really objective, and whether politics can still be distinguished from pop culture.

Contributions by: Vanessa Beasley, David Crockett, Jill Edy, Jeffrey P. Jones, Regina Lawrence, Lisbeth Lipari, Shawn Parry-Giles, Amy Pool