Ruthie Kelly’s broad interests are mass media effects on individual and collective conceptions of the political process, political participation, government and policy, and how those conceptions influence attitudes, behavior and choices in the public and the concurrent impact on political institutions and actors. Her work examines the impact of portrayals in a wide variety of persuasive contexts, including entertainment, news, education and advertising, across a variety of mediums such as television, film, social media, blogs, newspapers, podcasts and more. She received her BA with honors in journalism and political science from San Diego State University, where she wrote an award winning undergraduate thesis exploring the effects of political entertainment television on willingness to vote for female presidential candidates, and her MA from USC. She uses a mix of methods that are quantitative, qualitative, and rhetorical for empirical analysis of political phenomena.