The Blended Language of Partisanship in the 2012 Presidential Campaign

Hart, Roderick P.; Lind, Colene J.

doi:10.1177/0002764213506220

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Campaigning in line with the median voter theorem would suggest that moving to the middle before a general election would be a successful strategy. Research indicates that this rhetorical shift does occur; for instance, in 2012 Obama and Romney both invoked a language style unique to each party early in their campaigns but both candidates sounded more and more similar as the election neared (Hart & Lind, 2013).…”

Section: Campaign Strategiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While Downs (1957) makes no explicit mention of the influence of time, we test whether appeals change over time in light of research suggesting that candidates position themselves on Twitter differently during primaries and general elections (Shapiro, Hemphill, & Otterbacher, 2017). We examine the general election period (roughly Labor Day to Election Day -see, e.g., (Broh, 1980;Traugott, 2005;Wlezien & Erikson, 2002)) specifically to determine whether change occurs within that time frame; prior work indicates a rhetorical shift to the median among presidential candidates during that period (Hart & Lind, 2013). Any movement toward the center would still leave candidates more appealing to more extreme voters of their party than their opponent, leading us to our initial hypothesis: H1: As the election nears, politicians will communicate in less polarized ways.…”

Section: Campaign Strategiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Appealing to the base or to the moveable middle? Incumbents’ partisan messaging before the 2016 U.S. congressional elections

Hemphill¹,

Shapiro

2019

Journal of Information Technology & Politics

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This paper examines partisan communications of incumbent members of Congress during the nine weeks leading up to the U.S. 2016 election. The central premise is rooted in the median voter theorem, which is coupled with theories of political activation and reinforcement, to show how politicians communicate in order to attract support from large swaths of the public. We analyze the partisanship of tweets posted by incumbents in Congress using mixed-effects models to examine the relationships between party, time, and race competitiveness on the degree of partisanship expressed by politicians. Our results reveal that Democrats and Republicans exhibited different partisanship signaling patterns in the weeks before the election. Specifically, Democrats decreased their partisanship, perhaps to appeal to the median voter, while Republicans stayed consistent in their partisanship, potentially using Twitter to activate and reinforce voters rather than to win them over.

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Section: Campaign Strategiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Campaign Strategiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Appealing to the base or to the moveable middle? Incumbents’ partisan messaging before the 2016 U.S. congressional elections

Hemphill¹,

Shapiro

2019

Journal of Information Technology & Politics

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Conflicting Purposes in U.S. School Reform: The Paradoxes of Arne Duncan's Educational Rhetoric

Waisanen¹,

Kafka²

2020

Rhetoric and Public Affairs

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In this essay, we examine the complete published speeches of Arne Duncan from his seven years (2009–2015) as Barack Obama’s secretary of education, to understand how his language both defined problems and promoted solutions for our nation’s schools. By looking at Duncan’s rhetoric through close readings and computer-aided textual analyses, we find that his discourse contained paradoxes, particularly through a notion of schooling as a means of achieving both social justice and economic growth, by framing education as both a private and public good, and through assertions about the need for government both to centralize authority over schooling and promote a global educational marketplace. In essence, Duncan used a both/and approach to these purposes, adding to our understandings of the character and functions of educational rhetoric and showing how critical it is for scholars to recognize that such tensions exist in language about what education policy should do. Ultimately, we conclude that Duncan’s rhetoric obscures historic tensions in the purpose of education and highlights the way that policy rhetoric may saddle public education with responsibilities beyond its capacities.

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The Blended Language of Partisanship in the 2012 Presidential Campaign

Abstract: Here, we track the language patterns of Mitt

Cited by 2 publications

References 48 publications

Appealing to the base or to the moveable middle? Incumbents’ partisan messaging before the 2016 U.S. congressional elections

Appealing to the base or to the moveable middle? Incumbents’ partisan messaging before the 2016 U.S. congressional elections

Conflicting Purposes in U.S. School Reform: The Paradoxes of Arne Duncan's Educational Rhetoric

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