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Seidman, Steven A. Posters, Propaganda, and Persuasion in Election Campaigns Around the World and Through History. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2008. 327 pp. $33.95.
The role of the election campaign poster and its less artistic and more ephemeral sibling, the broadside, gets a long overdue survey in Steven A. Seidman's book, Post- ers, Propaganda and Persuasion in Election Campaigns Around the World and Through History. As the title suggests, the book cuts a wide swath in trying to examine how and why posters were used in national political campaigns in twelve democratic countries.
Seidman, an associate professor who chairs the Department of Strategic Com- munication at Ithaca College, devotes two chapters to the United States and one chap- ter each to the two other longstanding de- mocracies: Great Britain and France. He also spends one chapter giving quick snapshots of the use of election posters in a handful of national campaigns in nine democracies in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. In a Herculean effort of collection and copyright clearance, the book also contains nearly 200 black and white reproductions of campaign posters, most...