Handbook of Political Communication, the

The Handbook of Political Communication was edited in 1981 by Dan Nimmo and Keith R. Sanders. As the first compendium in the discipline of political communication, the book was designed to lay out the parameters of the field and to provide overviews of the extant scholarly literature in the various subfields that were developing. In the introduction, Nimmo and Sanders describe the growth and development of the field of political communication, noting that the components that comprise a discipline are present for political communication: a group of scholars who identify with the field, specialized divisions in national associations, journals that specialize in the content of the field, and university programs that offer degree specializations.

The individual chapters in the handbook are divided into sections. The first ...