Political Success and the Media

How have different media affected the linguistic performativity of the most prominent American politicians throughout history? How have different types of media allowed certain linguistic features to flourish, and others to fail? I address these question’s through a diachronic analysis of three different periods of American history as well as an investigation into effective linguistic features that manifest over the radio, through television, and on social media. In addition, I confront the myth that there is a relationship between reading level of speech determined by the Flesch-Kincaid algorithm and success as an orator. I find relationships between linguistic features unique to the media through which it is presented and conclude on how that affects the overall expertise of the candidate, but find no relationship between Flesch-Kincaid reading level and expertise

Transitioning into Academic Writing via a Soft CLIL Module on Immigration Issues

応用言語学における理論と実践 : 研究と教育を通し

Control, Communication, and the Voice of the Leader. A Control-Character Analysis of the 2016 US Presidential Debate

In the current research, we showed the strongest parts and the clouds of the speeches of the 2016 presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. A communication control analysis of this type could reveal the role control-characters play in assessing the performance of the actors of political communication. We also concluded that people want to be controlled in an easy but still total way. To make people think that there is a man who is able to do this: it was Donald Trump’s greatest asset. He was able to utter up to 37% more assertions than his opponent, clearly stressed the boundaries between ‘Us’ and ‘They’, and showed greater integrative complexity and objective control. As the result of our peculiar and detailed linguistic analyses, control direction and thematic role tests show that Trump was a man of ‘know’, ‘say’ and ‘take’, while Clinton was full of ‘think’ and ‘want.

MEDIA PRIMARIES: THE ROLE OF NEWSWORTHINESS VALUES IN SHAPING ISSUE COVERAGE IN PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARIES

Presidential primary candidates vie for the attention of voters by emphasizing specific issue stances or prioritizations. Yet not all candidates get their messages across. Why does the media follow the candidate’s agenda in some cases but not others? I answer this question by noting the role professional values play in journalists’ evaluations of “newsworthiness” and the important political ramifications those professional values have. Journalists prefer news stories that feature conflict, human-interest components, are timely, and are simple. I argue that there may be ways candidates can cue these values via their rhetoric and that the structure of primaries may affect how journalists apply these values when crafting coverage. I further argue that media outlets should differ in how strongly they prioritize these values. Finally, I argue that the media ignoring a candidate’s message should affect how voters evaluate candidates and how well voters are able to “correctly” vote. I show that the amount of anger language and candidate-based appeal rhetoric are positively correlated with the level of similarity between a candidate’s and the media’s agendas. I also show that expanding primary fields, where the contextual simplicity of the race is shrinking, are correlated with reductions in agenda similarity between candidates and the media. I also show that these effects are not homogenous across media outlets. Newspapers react more strongly to anger in candidate messages than TV news while news outlets with tighter space constraints are more responsive to declines in contextual simplicity. To assess the ramifications of these findings on political behavior I designed a laboratory experiment to test the effects of candidate-media agenda similarity on candidate evaluations and “correct” voting behavior. Subjects exposed to the low convergence treatment displayed higher rates of incorrect voting behavior. Collectively, these findings improve our understanding of the political repercussions of journalism’s professional values and provide insights into an oft-overlooked level of election. They also illustrate the normatively undesirable effects of low convergence. I close with a discussion of how to create a more efficient, media-centric primary process

Mapping moral language on US presidential primary campaigns reveals rhetorical networks of political division and unity

During political campaigns, candidates use rhetoric to advance competing visions and assessments of their country. Research reveals that the moral language used in this rhetoric can significantly influence citizens’ political attitudes and behaviors; however, the moral language actually used in the rhetoric of elites during political campaigns remains understudied. Using a data set of every tweet (N=139,412) published by 39 US presidential candidates during the 2016 and 2020 primary elections, we extracted moral language and constructed network models illustrating how candidates’ rhetoric is semantically connected. These network models yielded two key discoveries. First, we find that party affiliation clusters can be reconstructed solely based on the moral words used in candidates’ rhetoric. Within each party, popular moral values are expressed in highly similar ways, with Democrats emphasizing careful and just treatment of individuals and Republicans emphasizing in-group loyalty and respect for social hierarchies. Second, we illustrate the ways in which outsider candidates like Donald Trump can separate themselves during primaries by using moral rhetoric that differs from their parties’ common language. Our findings demonstrate the functional use of strategic moral rhetoric in a campaign context and show that unique methods of text network analysis are broadly applicable to the study of campaigns and social movements