Governing with Words

Daniel Q. Gillion is an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He was also the Ford Foundation Fellow and the Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar at Harvard University, Massachusetts. Professor Gillion's first book, The Political Power of Protest (Cambridge, 2013), was the winner of the Best Book Award from the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. His research has also been published in the academic journals Electoral Studies and The Journal of Politics, as well as in the edited volumes of The Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior.

• 1. Discursive governance: toward a holistic approach to understanding a dialogue on race in government; 2. Measuring the political dialogue on race; Part I. Societal Reception to a Dialogue on Race: 3. The backlash: does America disapprove of racial discussions?; 4. The benefits: political rhetoric and health awareness in the minority community; Part II. Political Institutions and a Dialogue on Race: 5. Racial frames and policy coalitions: how the dialogue on race shapes the creation of public policy; 6. The disconnect between political rhetoric and public policy; 7. A place for a racial dialogue in an aspiring post-racial society.

'Mark Twain once (apocryphally?) remarked that everyone talks about the weather but no one does anything about it. Daniel Gillion moves beyond this stasis by showing when and how political leaders talk about race, pivot from talk to actions, and absorb both positive and negative reactions from listeners. Through a subtle, imaginative, careful, and impassioned analysis, he shows that words matter - politically, morally, emotionally, substantively. A fascinating story.' Jennifer Hochschild, Harvard University, Massachusetts