The book examines the Reagan’s 1968, 1976, and 1980 presidential campaigns and Boris Yeltsin’s 1991 campaign, asking the following: does the nature of the campaign have any impact on the process of government that comes afterward?
Ronald Reagan and Boris Yeltsin were successful campaigners because they mastered the art of heresthetic-framing a situation so that others want to join you and structuring the world so you can win-according to new book whose co-authors include Condoleezza Rice, who is on leave from Stanford University and currently serving as U.S. secretary of state. The work, The Strategy of Campaigning: Lessons from Ronald Reagan and Boris Yeltsin (University of Michigan, Sept.), is also co-authored by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, a professor of politics at New York University, Kiron Skinner, an associate professor of history and political science at Carnegie Mellon University, and Serhiy Kudelia, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.
The book examines the Reagan’s 1968, 1976, and 1980 presidential campaigns and Boris Yeltsin’s 1991 campaign, asking the following: does the nature of the campaign have any impact on the process of government that comes afterward? “What makes the book important is the ability of the authors to relate this rich factual material to ideas about strategy-ideas from which future campaigners can benefit,” writes former Secretary of State George Shultz in the book’s introduction.
The Strategy of Campaigning combines theory, archival evidence, and secondary sources to gain insight into how politicians thought to be extremists within their own political setting were able to redefine issues and change institutions in order to move the political center to their advantage.
Bueno de Mesquita, also a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, has co-authored The Logic of Political Survival and authored The Trial of Ebenezer Scrooge and Principles of International Politics.
For review copies of the book, contact Mary Bisbee-Beek, director of publicity, University of Michigan Press, at 734.615.6477 or bisbeeb@umich.edu.