Questioning scrutiny:The effect of Prime Minister’s Questions on citizen efficacy and trust in parliament

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in The Journal of Legislative Studies on 2020-12-11, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13572334.2020.1850010. Deposited by shareyourpaper.org and openaccessbutton.org. We've taken reasonable steps to ensure this content doesn't violate copyright. However, if you think it does you can request a takedown by emailing [email protected]

A Vote for Me is a Vote for America: Patriotic Appeals in Presidential Elections

From H.W. Bush’s 1988 exaltation of the American flag to Donald Trump’s 2016 promise to “make America great again,” patriotic appeals have become a central rhetorical feature of contemporary American presidential campaigns. Despite intense scholarly debate over the meaning and normative value of patriotism, no systematic study of its role in electoral politics has been undertaken. This dissertation explores the usages and consequences of patriotic campaign rhetoric among white voters as an entrée to a deeper understanding of patriotism in the United States. Drawing on a content analysis of presidential campaign speeches, observational analyses from multiple elections, and a series of original survey experiments, this dissertation offers four key findings. First, presidential candidates presumably invoke patriotism because they believe it will accrue an electoral advantage — and it turns out this intuition is correct. Second, these effects are concentrated among whites with a strong sense of American identity. Patriotic appeals are electorally powerful because they bind candidates to the ideas, values, and norms that people associate with the heart and soul of America. However, they also feed into a larger dialogue about who counts as “truly American” — and who does not. This leads to my third finding, which is that when whites are exposed to Republican’s patriotic appeals, they express greater hostility toward African Americans, immigrants, and the poor. My final finding suggests that this is not a fixed or inevitable reality, but the result of historical and ongoing discursive processes. Over the last four decades, Republican candidates have rhetorically packaged patriotic appeals with discriminatory statements to promulgate a narrative of exclusionary patriotism. As a result, many whites treat “I love America” and “I hate American minorities” as interchangeable sentiments. Presidential campaigns represent critical moments when political elites and citizens are drawn into collective dialogue about the meaning of American identity and patriotism. Although prevailing patriotic campaign messages convey an electoral advantage to candidates and a psychological benefit to white voters, they exact a high cost on already disadvantaged minority groups. This implies that in its current form, American patriotism is largely incompatible with the values of a vibrant, liberal democracy

"i'm Not the President of Black America": Rhetorical versus Policy Representation

Copyright © American Political Science Association 2019. A key question in the study of minority representation is whether descriptive representatives provide superior substantive representation. Neglected in this literature is the distinction between two forms of substantive representation: rhetoric versus policy. We provide a systematic comparison of presidential minority representation along these two dimensions. Barack Obama was the first African American president, yet his substantive representation of African Americans has not been fully evaluated. Using speech and budget data, we find that relative to comparable presidents, Obama offered weaker rhetorical representation, but stronger policy representation, on race and poverty. While we cannot rule out non-racial explanations, Obama's policy proposals are consistent with minority representation. His actions also suggest that descriptive representatives may provide relatively better policy representation but worse rhetorical representation, at least when the constituency is a numerical minority. We thus highlight an understudied tension between rhetoric and policy in theories of minority representation