Strong Candidate, Nurturant Candidate: Moral Language in Presidential Television Advertisements

Abstract

Presidential television advertisements from 1980 through 2012 were examined to test empirically George Lakoff's descriptions of American moral ideology. Advertisements were coded for instantiations of the moral themes that Lakoff asserts underlie liberal and conservative ideology (Strict Father versus Nurturant Parent). Candidates' political‐party affiliation, election year, and policy issue(s) addressed in the television advertisement were assessed for their covariance with the use of these moral‐metaphorical instantiations. Findings support many of Lakoff's arguments. Republicans and Democrats generally differed in their use of these moral themes, both Strict Father and Nurturant Parent. There were no significant associations between election years (1980–2012) and instantiations of moral metaphors, with the exception of 2008, an anomalous year. Of particular import, we found that although Republicans rely on Strict Father dimensions, and Democrats rely more on Nurturant Parent, the most pronounced difference between parties was on the Nurturant Parent dimension. Implications for Lakoff's work and current moral psychology are discussed.

Moral Politics in the 2008 Presidential Convention Acceptance Speeches

“…Iyengar (2005) suggested, and our own previous work indicates, that the use of Strict Father and Nurturant Parent themes is likely to be context-dependent. The results of the current study suggest that Nurturant Parent themes were favored in 2008, perhaps because the circumstances of this campaign favored the Democratic Party (Moses & Gonzales, 2012). Moral metaphors used by both parties may well change over time, as citizens' concerns shift in response to both domestic and international events.…”

“…Given widespread public disaffection with the Bush administration's domestic and foreign policy, Republican issues may have been to some extent ''taboo'' for Republican candidates in 2008, and McCain and Palin responded accordingly. Indeed, research examining the prevalence of Strict Father and Nurturant Parent themes in presidential television ads from 1980 to 2008 revealed that in 2008, more than any other year, Nurturant Parent themes outnumbered Strict Father themes (Moses & Gonzales, 2012). Both the political climate and a hesitation to discuss Republican issues may have left Republican candidates with relatively few avenues via which to draw on Strict Father moral language.…”

How to identify moral language in presidential speeches: A comparison between a social-psychological and a cognitive-linguistic approach to corpus analysis

“…One point of criticism addressed by a number of studies is the relatively small amount of empirical support that Lakoff presents to support his theory (e. g. Bar-Lev 2007;Ohl et al 2013). Accordingly, several studies (e. g. Cienki 2005; Deason and Gonzales 2012; Moses and Gonzales 2015;Ohl et al 2013;Wolters 2012) have examined political discourse to test Lakoff's assertions on moral reasoning. However, at least two distinct annotation schemes have been used to answer these questions; while social-psychological scholars have identified any expression that could be considered an example of one of the two models, without considering the metaphoricity of the expression (Deason and Gonzales 2012;Moses and Gonzales 2015;Ohl et al 2013), cognitive-linguistic scholars have analyzed texts to find metaphorical language that could be ascribed to one of the two models (Cienki 2005;Wolters 2012).…”

“…These different studies yielded diverging results. Some came to the conclusion that conservatives indeed use more Strict Father language than liberals, and liberals use more Nurturant Parent language than conservatives (Cienki 2005;Moses and Gonzales 2015). Another study, however, found that both conservatives and liberals use more Strict Father language when talking about one issue, and more Nurturant Parent language when talking about some other issue (Wolters 2012).…”

“…In order to answer this question, this study compares one annotation scheme based on the social-psychological approach (Moses and Gonzales 2015) to one annotation scheme with a cognitive-linguistic approach (Wolters 2012) by applying them to the same corpus of twenty speeches, ten of which were delivered by George W. Bush and ten of which were delivered by Barack Obama. The results of the two annotation schemes are compared to determine whether they yield similar results and could thus be considered to be equally appropriate ways of testing the presence of moral language according to TMR.…”