Posters, Propaganda, and Persuasion in Election Campaigns Around the World and Through History

by Steven A. Seidman

Providing a unique political history, this book traces the impact that these posters as well as broadsides, banners, and billboards have had around the world over the last two centuries. It focuses on the use of this campaign material in the United States, as well as in France, Great Britain, Germany, South Africa, Japan, Mexico, and many other countries. The book examines how posters evolved and discusses their changing role in the twentieth century and thereafter; how technology, education, legislation, artistic movements, advertising, and political systems effected changes in election posters and other campaign media, and how they were employed around the world. This comprehensive and original overview of this campaign material includes the first extensive review of the research literature on the topic. Posters, Propaganda, and Persuasion will be useful to scholars and students interested in communications, politics, history, advertising and marketing, art history, and graphic design.

327 pages, Paperback

First published September 2, 2008

About the author

Steven A. Seidman is professor emeritus of communication management and design and formerly chair of the Department of Strategic Communication of Ithaca College's Roy H. Park School of Communication. He taught college and university students for more than forty years, most recently in an online undergraduate course on political campaign imagery at Ithaca College and a graduate course on political communication campaigns there.

He received his Ph.D. in instructional systems technology from Indiana University, Bloomington in 1982. His interest in election campaigns began when President Dwight D. Eisenhower paraded through his neighborhood in New York City in 1956, and he received a poster celebrating Ike's sixty-sixth birthday. An interest in the politics of other countries commenced during a visit to Chile in 1970, when he witnessed the campaign that culminated in the election of Salvador Allende.

Dr. Seidman spent four years researching and writing his book, Poster, Propaganda, and Persuasion in Election Campaigns Around the World and Through History, described by David Welch (Professor of Modern History and Director of the Centre for the Study of Propaganda and War, University of Kent, England) as "the best study of the modern political poster that I have read" and by Lynda Lee Kaid (Professor of Telecommunication in the College of Journalism and Communications, University of Florida) as "an outstanding description of how American political campaigns have used political posters." And Simon Downs, in a review in the journal, The Poster, wrote that the book was "a work of clarity and depth, a feat that is to be applauded and emulated. The book delivers everything that the title promises and more.... The book is as tightly packed as an egg with good things; it is crammed with well-crafted arrays of facts that capture the minute flows of political manoeuvres across the centuries.... Written in a deceptively easy style, the book allows the reader to consider the material without battling the delivery."

In 2010, the book won the Park Faculty Writing Award. Dr. Seidman also was presented with the International Visual Literacy Association's Research Award in 2010--only the ninth recipient of this honor in twenty years.