Introduction to the special issue: Elections, rhetoric and American foreign policy in the age of Donald Trump

Lacatus, Corina; Meibauer, Gustav

doi:10.1177/0263395720935376

Cited by 23 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 78 publications

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“…Notably, the president reportedly pushed advisers to accelerate the timeline of that drawdown even faster than anticipated in the original agreement, so as to better satisfy his electoral priorities (Gibbons-Neff and Barnes, 2020). The transparent and unapologetically political nature of his rationale for these decisions is striking, and speaks to the point made well in the introduction to this special issue (Lacatus and Meibauer, 2020) that incumbent presidents can expect to be held to account by voters for their ability to act on the rhetorical commitments made on the campaign trail. Like any president, Trump has good electoral reasons for trying to fulfil his promises (Bernstein, 2019;Fishel, 1985).…”

mentioning

confidence: 85%

Bringing the boys back home: Campaign promises and US decision-making in Iraq and Vietnam

Payne

2020

Politics

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This article argues that electoral politics acts as an important constraint on presidential decision-making in war. Going beyond the existing literature’s focus on cases of conflict initiation, it outlines how electoral pressures push and pull presidents away from courses of action which may otherwise be deemed strategically optimal. Importantly, however, these electoral constraints will not just apply on the immediate eve of an election but will vary in strength across the electoral calendar. Together, this conceptual framework helps explain why presidential fulfilment of rhetorical pledges made on the previous campaign trail may be belated and often inconsistent. To probe the plausibility of these arguments, case studies of the closing stages of the wars in Vietnam and Iraq are outlined, drawing on archival and elite interview material. These episodes demonstrate that electoral accountability can be a powerful factor affecting wartime decision-making, but its effect is non-linear, and not easily observed through a narrow focus on particular timeframes.

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mentioning

confidence: 85%

Bringing the boys back home: Campaign promises and US decision-making in Iraq and Vietnam

Payne

2020

Politics

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“…More exposure may have enabled participants to more reliably encode conditioned variation indicative of Republican affiliation. In addition, dramatic shifts in rhetoric during the Trump administration [70] could have made instances of Republican speech more salient and easier for participants to retrieve from memory (see General discussion).…”

Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 99%

Can we detect conditioned variation in political speech? two kinds of discussion and types of conversation

2021

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Previous work has demonstrated that certain speech patterns vary systematically between sociodemographic groups, so that in some cases the way a person speaks is a valid cue to group membership. Our work addresses whether or not participants use these linguistic cues when assessing a speaker’s likely political identity. We use a database of speeches by U.S. Congressional representatives to isolate words that are statistically diagnostic of a speaker’s party identity. In a series of four studies, we demonstrate that participants’ judgments track variation in word usage between the two parties more often than chance, and that this effect persists even when potentially interfering cues such as the meaning of the word are controlled for. Our results are consistent with a body of literature suggesting that humans’ language-related judgments reflect the statistical distributions of our environment.

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“…In this sense, this article aims to answer Destradi and Plagemann’s (2018: 299) call for further comparative studies on the relationship in question. As noted in the introduction to this special issue (Lacatus and Meibauer, 2021), the focus of these essays is not the ‘conceptual debates about the nature of populism’. Instead, scholarship on populism is used here as an analytical tool in explaining the relationship between Trump’s rhetoric and his administration’s foreign policy.…”

Section: Populism and Foreign Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In line with the focus of this special issue (Lacatus and Meibauer, 2021), this article asks how Donald Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric 1 on the campaign trail and in the White House has affected US foreign policy. More specifically, this article focuses on the area of overseas counterterrorism campaigns, or what was originally known as the ‘War on Terror’.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

In search of enemies: Donald Trump’s populist foreign policy rhetoric

Hall

2020

Politics

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This article asks how Donald Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric during his presidential campaign and presidency has affected US foreign policy in the area of overseas counterterrorism campaigns. Looking at two case studies – the May 2017 Arab Islamic American Summit and the US role in the counter Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) campaign, it is argued that Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric has failed to accurately describe or legitimate his administration’s counterterrorism strategy, as per the conventional wisdom. Instead, Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric has largely been aimed at creating a sense of crisis (as populism requires) to mobilise his domestic base. In making this argument about the purpose of Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric, not only does the article contribute a new perspective to the extant literature on elections, rhetoric, and US foreign policy, but also to the burgeoning scholarship on governing populists and their foreign policies. Although these findings could be unique to Trump, the article’s novel framework – combining International Relations and populism scholarship to elaborate on how the foreign arena can be used to generate a state of perpetual crisis – can hopefully be applied in other contexts.

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Introduction to the special issue: Elections, rhetoric and American foreign policy in the age of Donald Trump

Cited by 23 publications

References 78 publications

Bringing the boys back home: Campaign promises and US decision-making in Iraq and Vietnam

Bringing the boys back home: Campaign promises and US decision-making in Iraq and Vietnam

Can we detect conditioned variation in political speech? two kinds of discussion and types of conversation

In search of enemies: Donald Trump’s populist foreign policy rhetoric

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