This collection provides an overview of the broad landscape of political communication, with material suited for the theorist and the more practically inclined. The main criterion for organizing this collection was diversity—presenting a range of authors and ideas. The contributions cover a span of almost eighty years, beginning with an article from 1927 and culminating with work from the first decade of the 21st century. Some of the authors are famous scholars and some are little known, but each article is like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle and fits into an appropriate place.

Not every political communication topic is addressed and not every viewpoint is included, but these volumes contain material that may spark the scholar’s imagination and spur thinking about the breadth of this field. By using this collection as a starting point, anyone interested in political communication should be able to find material that will point the way down many research paths.

A compelling case can be made that political change throughout the world is being driven, directly and indirectly, by political communication. That should provide great incentive to the researchers whose yet-to-be-written articles will be the descendants of the works collected in these volumes.