Racing Jesse Jackson: Leadership, Masculinity, and the Black Presidency

In June of 1983, the New York Times published a survey revealing that nearly one in five white voters would not vote for a black candidate for president, even if that candidate was qualified and was the party nominee.2 For some readers, such a revelation might have induced shock or even outrage; for others the poll would merely reflect an obvious and ugly reality. The survey was prompted by the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s attempt to become the first black, Democratic nominee for president. A news story exploring the prevalence of white racism in the United States was not uncommon when Jesse Jackson campaigned for the presidency in 1984 and 1988. The mainstream press framed Jackson’s candidacies as an index for measuring racial progress, and in some cases, as an outright referendum on race in the United States. Jackson’s own critiques of white establishment politics helped assure that his race—his blackness—would seem to foreground all representations of him. Discussions of Jackson during this time were particularly complex since the continuation of civil rights battles finds itself in “multicultural” and “multiracial environments” complicated by “social, political, and legal constructions of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and religion, among others.”3 The symbolic generation and exchange of identity markers therefore has a particular rhetorical significance for contemporary “race” studies that Jackson’s presidential campaigns are uniquely suited to bring to our attention

Performing Private Life on the Public Stage: Tracing Narratives of Presidential Family Lives, Leisure and Masculinities in US News Media

Images and stories about US presidents’ family lives, private vacations and athletic identities are constants in the political news media landscape. These news representations texture and shape how the presidents are envisioned in popular imagination as powerful political figures and embodiments of contemporary masculinities. This study explicates US news media representations of President Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama in select mainstream political news publications from the 1990s to the 2000s. This study further considers how the cultural forces of heteronormativity, patriarchy, Baby Boomer masculinity, class, race and taste influenced popular presidential images. Much of the news discourse regarding presidents as private people, as men of family and leisure and taste, sought to create piecemeal mosaics of powerful men. But this genre of political storytelling also ruminated on larger cultural concerns about masculinity, authenticity, identity and persona within political journalism and political culture at large

Політична мова як предмет наукового дослідження

В сучасній політичній науці спостерігається зростання інтересу до проблематики політичної мови. Це пов’язано з розширенням сфери політичної комунікації, зростанням ролі інформаційного впливу в сучасній політичній практиці, де, як відомо, мова завжди була і залишається одним з найважливіших засобів передачі інформації

Mapping legitimacy discourses in democratic nation states: Great Britain, Switzerland, and the Unites States compared

This working paper first outlines the contours of a discourse analytical approach to the study of legitimation processes and then presents findings from a quantitative analysis of legitimacy-related communication in selected print media of the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and the United States in 2004. Our data suggest considerable differences between the three countries with regard to levels of (de)legitimation, privileged legitimation resources, and legitimation styles. The micro dynamics of legitimation processes in 2004 were characterised by nationally specific legitimation attention cycles. References to internationalisation and deparliamentarisation - two trends that are often held responsible for a severe legitimacy crisis of the nation state and representative democracy - play no more than a marginal role in legitimacy discourses. We conclude that evidence for a pervasive and full-fledged erosion of the nation state's legitimacy - or a uniform shift from input to output legitimation - is scant. -- Das Arbeitspapier skizziert die Grundzüge eines diskursanalytischen Ansatzes für die Untersuchung von Legitimationsprozessen und präsentiert Ergebnisse einer quantitativen Analyse der legitimationsrelevanten Kommunikation, die im Jahr 2004 in ausgewählten Printmedien aus Großbritannien, der Schweiz und den USA veröffentlicht wurde. Es zeigen sich deutliche Unterschiede zwischen den drei Ländern hinsichtlich des Ausmaßes von legitimierenden bzw. delegitimierenden Stellungnahmen, hinsichtlich der jeweils eingesetzten Legitimationsressourcen und der vorherrschenden Legitimationsstile. Die Mikrodynamik von Legitimationsprozessen ist durch national spezifische - Legitimations-Aufmerksamkeits-Zyklen - gekennzeichnet. Bezugnahmen auf Internationalisierung und Deparlamentarisierung - zwei Entwicklungen, die häufig als Ursachen für eine ernstliche Legitimationskrise des Nationalstaats bzw. der repräsentativen Demokratie angesehen werden - spielen in den untersuchten Legitimationsdiskursen nur eine untergeordnete Rolle. Für eine weitreichende Erosion nationalstaatlicher Legitimität - oder auch nur für eine systematische Verschiebung von input- hin zu output-orientierten Legitimationsargumenten - finden sich keine Anzeichen.

Transformations of the Political Communication in Social Media Era – from Mediatization to Decentralization

The political communication in media era performs on two dimensions: the horizontal dimension – between political actors and journalists – and on vertical dimension  – the media product is decentralized to the consumer public. In Social Media Era, the horizontal dimension completely disappears and the communication is routed by the online opinion leaders in the social groups. Thus, in the new public space, the main communication actors are not journalists and politicians, but public-receptor, which plays the role of opinion leaders. In Social Media, we can talk a lot about "the power of the receptor", that is decentralizing, without intermediaries, the political message to discuss it in the social groups to which they belong

The Model of Public Communication

This paper aims to structure a Public Communication model within the current social development context. The analysis of the existing communication techniques and the sociologic imagination as work methods applied to the administration field has identified the specifics of public communication, the features of cultural change engaged by the new notion of governing and governance with effects upon public action. Also, this paper explains the consequences, namely the effects of decentralization, European integration and globalization upon the transformation of the public sector and upon the state administrative reform. In a new social realty a new social communication model specific to governance is subscribed

Fiscal Policy Announcements of Italian Governments and Spread Reaction during the Sovereign Debt Crisis

This paper attempts to evaluate the effects of fiscal policy announcements by the Italian government on the long-term sovereign bond spread of Italy relative to Germany. After collecting data on relevant fiscal policy announcements, we perform an econometric comparative analysis between the three cabinets that followed one another during the period 2009-2013. The results suggest that only fiscal policy announcements made by members of Monti's cabinet have been effective in influencing the Italian spread, revealing a remarkable credibility gap between Monti's technocratic administration and Berlusconi's and Letta's governments

La comunicación de crisis en casos de terrorismo : Paris 2015

Universidad de Sevilla. Máster en Comunicación Institucional y Polític