AAPSS Fellow Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s latest book, Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President: What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know, was awarded the 2018 R. R. Martin Award by the Association of American Publishers, given to a single book every year to “recognize outstanding scholarly works in all disciplines of the arts and sciences.”
The jurors for the prize called Jamieson’s book a work of “scholarship at its finest, a narrative page-turner that could not be of greater consequence.”
In a data-driven approach to studying the 2016 presidential election, Jamieson presents the case that Russia’s clandestine influence campaign likely was key to Trump’s victory. “I’m not arguing that Russians pulled the voting levers,” Jamieson explains. “I’m arguing that they persuaded enough people to either vote a certain way or not vote at all.”
Jamieson details the Russian manipulations and examines how they were aided by the reactions of the press, the political parties and candidates, and an increasingly polarized public. Though she acknowledges that we cannot know with absolute certainty what tipped the 2016 election, she warns that the vulnerabilities exposed in the last presidential election have not been addressed, leaving America open to continued attacks in a covert cyberwar.
