In this volume, scholars of cinema studies, philosophy, English, sociology, health-care education, women’s studies, bioethics, and other fields demonstrate how the world of medicine engages and permeates the media that surround us. Whether examining the press coverage of the Jack Kevorkian–euthanasia controversy; pondering questions about accessibility, accountability, and professionalism raised by such films as Awakenings, The Doctor, and Lorenzo’s Oil; analyzing the depiction of doctors, patients, and medicine on E.R. and Chicago Hope; or considering the ways in which digital technologies have redefined the medical body, these essays are consistently illuminating and provocative.
Contributors. Arthur Caplan, Tod Chambers, Stephanie Clark-Brown, Marc R. Cohen, Kelly A. Cole, Lucy Fischer, Lester D. Friedman, Joy V. Fuqua, Sander L. Gilman, Norbert Goldfield, Joel Howell, Therese Jones, Timothy Lenoir, Gregory Makoul, Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Faith McLellan, Jonathan M. Metzl, Christie Milliken, Martin F. Norden, Kirsten Ostherr, Limor Peer, Audrey Shafer, Joseph Turow, Greg VandeKieft, Otto F. Wahl
In this era in which more women are running for public office—and when there is increased activism among women—understanding gender differences on political issues has become critical. In her cogent study, Mary-Kate Lizotte argues that assessing the gender gap in public support for policies through a values lens provides insight into American politics today. There is ample evidence that men and women differ in their value endorsements—even when taking into account factors such as education, class, race, income, and party identification.
In Gender Differences in Public Opinion, Lizotte utilizes nationally representative data, mainly from the American National Election Study, to study these gender gaps, the explanatory power of values, and the political consequences of these differences. She examines the gender differences in several policy areas such as equal rights, gun control, the death penalty, and the environment, as well as social welfare issues. The result is an insightful and revealing study of how men and women vary in their policy positions and political attitudes.
This book presents a sociological study of how and why racial prejudice against members of a minority group comes to shape what happens to important political claims and aspirations of the group. Lawrence Bobo and Mia Tuan explore a lengthy controversy surrounding the fishing, hunting, and gathering rights of the Chippewa Indians in Wisconsin. The controversy started in 1974, when two Chippewa Indians were arrested for off-reservation fishing, and persisted into the 1990s. It involved the efforts of the Chippewa to assert their traditional spearfishing rights, which met with angry, racially charged responses from whites.
Bobo and Tuan develop a "group position" perspective on racial attitudes that takes account of the complex interplay of racial stereotypes and negative group feelings as well as the vested interests, collective privileges, and political threats that form the basis of racialized political disputes. They explore whether theories that explain race politics in the case of black-white relations are applicable to understanding Indian-white relations. The book uses a carefully designed survey of public opinion to explore the dynamics of prejudice and political contestation, and to further our understanding of how and why racial prejudice enters into politics in the United States.
Despite widespread agreement that the District of Columbia's political system has collapsed, there is a serious lack of thoughtful proposals addressing the political future of the nation's capital. In this book, Edward M. Meyers examines the opinions of average Americans about Washington, D.C., in order to understand how many Americans are likely to approach the question of what reforms are needed.
Meyers first explores the political, economic, and social conditions of the District, providing an informed context for understanding and evaluating its political options. Presenting the results of in-depth qualitative research with focus groups held across the country, Meyers reveals that regardless of the participants' knowledge about the District, their beliefs in six basic concepts or schemata—such as respect for democratic rights, attitudes about race, and aversion to an intrusive federal government—molded their opinions about various options for District self-governance. The book concludes with insights into the District by local and national political leaders, including OMB Director Alice Rivlin, Jesse Jackson, Representatives Eleanor Holmes Norton, Thomas Davis, and James Walsh, and Marion Barry.
In 1753, at the request of the London Jewish community, the Peiham administration passed an act repealing the religious test that prevented Jewish aliens from being naturalized. This act, formally known as the Jewish Naturalization Act, was of negligible practical importance, but political opponents exploited the issue for an upcoming election campaign. The "Jew Bill" became a battle cry that swept across England. The Peiham administration, sensing the political damage that could be caused by the bill, bowed to the clamor and then took the initiative in defeating its own act.
This book is the first thorough account of that notorious but little-understood episode in English history. Using a largely narrative form the author first discusses the position of the Jews in the mid-eighteenth century and explains why they sought and obtained passage of the bill. He then recounts the beginnings of opposition to it and discusses the religious, economic, political, and psychological reasons for the opposition. He describes in detail the propaganda campaign against the bill and the resultant effect on the election.
The author concludes that this was not an isolated explosion of anti-Semitism, but rather a renewal of a long-standing debate over general naturalization policy. He further concludes that Parliament was more sensitive to public opinion than is generally supposed and that the terms "Whig supremacy" or "trusteeship" are not entirely accurate.
The reader will find that this study reveals much of the English political system of that era: the style and structure of parliamentary politics and electioneering; religious attitudes and economic notions; and the methods and ethical and intellectual standards of journalism and political propaganda.
While we’ve long known that the strategies of terrorism rely heavily on media coverage of attacks, Selling Fear is the first detailed look at the role played by media in counterterrorism—and the ways that, in the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration manipulated coverage to maintain a climate of fear.
Drawing on in-depth analysis of counterterrorism in the years after 9/11—including the issuance of terror alerts and the decision to invade Iraq—the authors present a compelling case that the Bush administration hyped fear, while obscuring civil liberties abuses and concrete issues of preparedness. The media, meanwhile, largely abdicated its watchdog role, choosing to amplify the administration’s message while downplaying issues that might have called the administration’s statements and strategies into question. The book extends through Hurricane Katrina, and the more skeptical coverage that followed, then the first year of the Obama administration, when an increasingly partisan political environment presented the media, and the public, with new problems of reporting and interpretation.
Selling Fear is a hard-hitting analysis of the intertwined failures of government and media—and their costs to our nation.
The essence of democracy is popular sovereignty. The people rule. In the United States, citizens exercise this right through elected officials who they believe will best represent their own values and interests. But are those interests and values always being followed? Authors Michael B. Berkman and Eric Plutzer provide the first systematic examination of the extent to which the governments closest to the American public—its 10,000-plus local school boards—respond to the wishes of the majority.
Ten Thousand Democracies begins with a look at educational reforms from the Progressive era in the late 19th and early 20th centuries through the civil rights movement and ending with Pennsylvania's 2004 tax relief measure. Berkman and Plutzer explore what factors determine education spending levels in school districts, including the effects of public opinion, the nature of local political institutions, and the roles played by special interests. The authors show how board members are selected, how well the boards represent minorities, whether the public can bypass the board through referenda, and how the schools are financed. By providing an innovative statistical portrait that combines public opinion data with Census data for these school districts, the authors answer questions central to democratic control of our schools: how responsive are school boards to their public and when? How powerful are such special interests such as teachers' unions and senior citizens? By using the lens of America's public school districts to examine the workings of democracy, Ten Thousand Democracies offers new insight not only into the forces shaping local education policy but also how democratic institutions may function throughout all levels of government.
The world’s richer democracies all provide such public benefits as pensions and health care, but why are some far more generous than others? And why, in the face of globalization and fiscal pressures, has the welfare state not been replaced by another model? Reconsidering the myriad issues raised by such pressing questions, Clem Brooks and Jeff Manza contend here that public opinion has been an important, yet neglected, factor in shaping welfare states in recent decades.
Analyzing data on sixteen countries, Brooks and Manza find that the preferences of citizens profoundly influence the welfare policies of their governments and the behavior of politicians in office. Shaped by slow-moving forces such as social institutions and collective memories, these preferences have counteracted global pressures that many commentators assumed would lead to the welfare state’s demise. Moreover, Brooks and Manza show that cross-national differences in popular support help explain why Scandinavian social democracies offer so much more than liberal democracies such as the United States and the United Kingdom.
Significantly expanding our understanding of both public opinion and social policy in the world’s most developed countries, this landmark study will be essential reading for scholars of political economy, public opinion, and democratic theory.
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