Pressuring the President: Changing language practices and the growth of political accountability

Abstract

This paper examines two historical trends in practices of questioning deployed across a half-century (1953–2000) of U.S. presidential news conferences (164 conferences, 4608 questions): (1) the decline of conventionally indirect question forms, and (2) the rise of negative interrogatives as a polar question format. Both trends show journalists to be exerting increasing pressure on presidents over time but they differ in the nature of that pressure, with the decline of indirectness involving pressure to answer the question at all, and the rise of negative interrogatives involving pressure to answer in a particular way (affirmatively). Both trends have been noted in previous research, but here we take a closer look at how they differ in the pace of change over time, and their varying sensitivity to the exogenous sociopolitical landscape. Among conventionally indirect question frames, contrasting trendlines for “ability” versus “willingness” frames are also examined. All of these language-practice trends span the era of the public questioning of presidents and are thus implicated in mechanisms of governmental accountability.