National Annenberg Election Survey scholars Kate Kenski, Ph.D., Bruce Hardy, Ph.D., and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Ph.D., have won the 2011 International Communication Association Outstanding Book Award for their book The Obama Victory: How Media, Money, and Message Shaped the 2008 Election (Oxford 2010).
The award honors a book published in the previous two calendar years based on criteria including the importance of the problem it addresses to the fields represented in ICA and to communication studies as a whole, the quality of writing and argument, and the strength of evidence it presents.
The authors used data from the 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey – the largest survey conducted during the presidential election by the academy – to construct their in-depth analysis of the historic 2008 presidential election. Among The Obama Victory’s praise is a review by Thomas Edsall: “This book could transform the way we understand presidential campaigns,” Edsall wrote. “Kate Kenski, Bruce W. Hardy, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson give us a fascinating window into accelerating technological advances driving—and driven by—consultants and operatives over the past decade. Every assertion is backed up with an extraordinary array of statistics, facts, and figures. The authors bring forward both a huge database complete with precise information on the cost and timing of all paid media, and a meticulous study of the content of news coverage, particularly the debates. The data are presented with a political acuity that should stand as a model for all future studies.”
Earlier this year The Obama Victory won the 2010 American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Award) in the area of government & politics.
