Political Tone: How Leaders Talk and Why. By Roderick P.Hart, Jay P.Childers, and Colene J.Lind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 280 pp.

Abstract

Political Tone: How Leaders Talk and Why. By Roderick P. Hart, Jay P. Childers, and Colene J. Lind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 280 pp. For a concept as ubiquitous as tone, there is surprisingly little research as it relates to politics. Political Tone fills that void, examining how politicians craft their rhetoric under a variety of different circumstances, why they pick the tone they do, and postulating about the effects of tone on public perceptions. One of the major contributions of this work is the establishment of myriad (p. 14) for studying political rhetoric. The authors use the opening part of the book to describe their automated coding method: DICTION. This method deploys user-established dictionaries to code text on any number of dimensions and has been used in research on political rhetoric for many years. The construction of these dictionaries has been explained in greater detail elsewhere. However, Political Tone devotes little time on such explanations, meaning that readers without some background in the area might feel lost in this portion of the book. Nonetheless, DICTION offers an improvement over the status quo as it allows the authors to draw on a wide swath of theoretical literature to establish Democratic and Republican tones. Too often research uses what the authors describe as an atheoretical (p. 62) approach in which scholars either use reference texts to establish how partisans speak or adopt some of the machine-learning approaches that use a list of words derived from the texts themselves. These lists often fail under close examination by including words that have no theoretical expectation of partisan valence. In this respect, Political Tone provides an important service to the study of political rhetoric by drawing a road map that future scholars would be wise to follow. Chapter 3 builds these dictionaries, and then uses them to explore the use of partisan tone over time and to compare different presidential candidates. The latter portion of the book shows how the authors are able to apply their approach. Chapter 6, for example, explores the tonal variation President Bill Clinton employed through the impeachment scandal. It shows how in his more impulsive moments, he abandoned his usual measured style--one that was focused on the community--and instead shifted his rhetoric inward to focus on the trials he was facing. The authors do an excellent job of showing how Clinton's rhetorical style changed through different speeches. In doing so, they offer insight into how rhetorical construction helped him not only survive a scandal that could very well have ended his career but remain the most popular politician in the country through the 2000 election. Chapter 7 offers another good example of the authors' approach in its analysis of the rhetoric of George W. Bush and his use of hortatory tone. …