US Presidential Election Research Articles

Self-presentation of the US presidential candidates in 2016 and 2020

Abstract Politicians often mention their personality traits when communicating with the public that aligns with the concept of impression management (Benoit and McHale 2003). This suggests that politicians can use their personalities to create a favorable image during election campaigns (Van Santen and Van Zoonen 2010). However, previous research has not adequately incorporated personality theories into the study of impression management (Clifford 2018). Addressing this gap, our study examines how presidential candidates presented themselves during the 2016 and 2020 US elections, and explores the personality traits emphasized in campaign communication. Our research combines qualitative and quantitative methods and diverse data sources, including political commercials and speeches. This study contributes to the field by incorporating personality theories into the study of political impression management.

Charismatic Leadership, and Its Detrimental Role in American Presidential Elections

Presidential leadership in the U.S. is very much dependent on the seemingly rational support from voters, which can be obtained through the presentation of charisma. This paper delves into the compelling role of charismatic leadership in shaping the outcomes of American presidential elections, focusing on the charismatic appeals of John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama. By analyzing their distinctive campaigns and contextualizing their charisma within historical and socio-political frameworks as well as pre-existing works on charismatic leadership cross the globe, the study illuminates the intricate interplay between individual magnetism, strategic messaging, and collective resonance. While charisma emerges as a potent campaign tool, its impact is multifaceted and contingent upon contextual factors, making it a complex force in the electoral process. Through this analysis of charismatic leadership, this paper aims to understand how presidents in the US can be re-evaluated. The paper conclude that charisma played a pivotal role in the campaigns and presidencies of Kennedy, Reagan, and Obama, each leveraging their unique charismatic qualities, such as physical attractiveness, authoritative aura, inspirational rhetoric, and the ability to provide collective coping mechanisms.

Asian American University Students' Experiences during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Qualitative Study.

In addition to the unprecedented challenges and stressors that university students faced during the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian American students experienced specific hardships due to COVID-19-associated xenophobic attitudes, harassment, and assault against people of Asian complexions. This qualitative study aimed to explore the ways in which Asian American university students' experiences during the pandemic changed their views of their identities as Asian Americans by analyzing in-depth interviews of four case study participants. Secondary analysis of two waves of interviews, which were conducted during the initial outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and during a six-month follow-up, and primary analysis of a newly conducted third wave one year after the initial outbreak yielded 12 themes that captured the essence of the Asian American university students' experience and redefining of their identity during the pandemic. The four participants identified these themes across four categories: Experiences and Events during the Pandemic; Categorization of Asians in America; Confronting Asian Discrimination; and Renewed Sense of Identity. The longitudinal findings revealed direct experiences and perspectives regarding the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on Asian communities, as well as the impact of the various social and political events during this time period, such as the Black Lives Matter Movement (2020) and the 2020 US presidential election. The implications, limitations, and future directions are discussed.

The Digital Services Act, the First Amendment, and deputised surveillance

ABSTRACT This Article will examine Chapter III Section 5 of the DSA, which requires the VLOPs and VLOSEs to rely on government-selected non-profit groups to engage in surveillance of users. The paper shows similarities between this approach and the ‘whole-of-society’ regime forwarded by certain members of the American intelligence and security apparatus in the aftermath of the 2016 US Presidential election. Several US agencies appear to have adopted this approach and, in fact, worked to limit the accessibility of online content during the 2020 elections and the Covid response. The US Supreme Court in Murthy v Missouri, No 23-411, will determine the constitutionality of these agency actions later this year. But, regardless of how the Court rules, the similarities between the ‘whole-of-society’ regime of information control and the mechanisms outlined Chapter III Section 5 of the DSA raise important questions about the role of government in controlling speech in a liberal society.

Karma Flows Political Wire – Forecasting the US Presidential Elections 2024

Karma Flows Political Wire – Forecasting the US Presidential Elections 2024

GeoExplainer: A Visual Analytics Framework for Spatial Modeling Contextualization and Report Generation.

Geographic regression models of various descriptions are often applied to identify patterns and anomalies in the determinants of spatially distributed observations. These types of analyses focus on answering why questions about underlying spatial phenomena, e.g., why is crime higher in this locale, why do children in one school district outperform those in another, etc.? Answers to these questions require explanations of the model structure, the choice of parameters, and contextualization of the findings with respect to their geographic context. This is particularly true for local forms of regression models which are focused on the role of locational context in determining human behavior. In this paper, we present GeoExplainer, a visual analytics framework designed to support analysts in creating explanative documentation that summarizes and contextualizes their spatial analyses. As analysts create their spatial models, our framework flags potential issues with model parameter selections, utilizes template-based text generation to summarize model outputs, and links with external knowledge repositories to provide annotations that help to explain the model results. As analysts explore the model results, all visualizations and annotations can be captured in an interactive report generation widget. We demonstrate our framework using a case study modeling the determinants of voting in the 2016 US Presidential Election.

The Many Genealogies of Feminist Activism

The stakes of feminist activism, and the fault lines within feminism, have a newfound significance in this cultural moment. In response to the fall of Roe, the ascendancy of incendiary far-right politics, and the mainstreaming of white-supremacist ideologies, grassroots feminist activism and its impacts have never mattered more. When reading Rachel Seidman's Speaking of Feminism and Arielle Rotramel's Pushing Back, both books that feature interviews and ethnographic work on feminists and feminist groups prior to the 2016 election (Seidman interviewed participants from 2014 to 2016, and Rotramel worked on this material primarily from 2007 to 2011), the gap between the pre- and post-2016 realities seems ever more stark. These books highlight feminisms just prior to the series of aggressive assaults that feminism (and all forms of social justice) would face following the 2016 US presidential election. Both serve as a kind of warning—feminists of all ages understood the hazards of fusing misogyny and white supremacy—and as capturing the histories of feminist activism before the cascade of traumas that would ensue from 2016 to the present day. In this way, feminist ethnographic work and interviews with activists operate as time capsules with unique relevance to the genealogical structure of feminist history and activism. By foregrounding women-of-color-led activisms in particular, historians can trace in this period the movement from theorizing about intersectionality to enacting feminist activisms that draw from experiences of marginalization. The significance of feminist work that built on, and contributed to, theorizing about intersecting identities and interlocking oppressions is brought boldly to life in these two texts.

Economic Impact of United States Presidential Election Years: A Comparative Analysis

Economic Impact of United States Presidential Election Years: A Comparative Analysis

The Role of Online and Geographically Distant Social Networks in Political Decision-Making: Empirical Evidence from the 2016 United States Presidential Election

Social ties play a prominent role in individuals’ political decision-making. They influence partisan defections, political participation, voting decisions, and political information acquisition. Much of the literature focuses on personal social networks or geographically close networks. Yet one’s social network might also include acquaintances or other connections in more distant places that are maintained via online networks. In this study, we exploit Facebook’s Social Connectedness Index, which reflects social connections across the United States, and we investigate the role of social connectedness in political decision-making among individuals who are located across distant geographical regions. Our results suggest that social connectedness between counties has a homogenizing effect on voting for the same presidential candidate, either Democratic or Republican. On the other hand, social connectedness is likely to have a differentiating effect on voting for an independent or a third-party candidate. Moreover, this effect is moderated by the socioeconomic characteristics of the counties, such as education, race, population density, household income, industry, and gender composition.

Social Engineering as a Tool for Warfare

In November, 2022, a blog went viral in Nigeria which claimed the United States of America was going to reject Dollar bills printed before the year 2021 as a means of curbing corruption in African countries where criminals and corrupt politician hoard the currency. It turned out to be a false tale, but had resulted in a brief reduction in the exchange rate of the United States Dollar to the Nigerian Naira. This illustrated how fake news could influence events and attitudes in a country, in this case, there was an economic impact (positive for the country); however, other social engineering techniques have been used to manipulate citizenry of countries in recent times, like suspected Russian interference in the United States Presidential elections in 2016 which swayed public opinion in favor Donald Trump and his emergence as president. Social engineering can be managed and controlled by way of awareness training and programs.

“The man who has money is king”: Discursive constructions of affluent domination of US politics in letters-to-the-editor, 1948–2016

ABSTRACT Scholarly and popular publications alike are rife with accusations and evidence of the wealthy’s outsized influence on US politics. The rich can vote more easily, have greater sway over policy, and comprise a disproportionate share of Congress. Yet few are asking what citizens have to say about both the real and perceived power of the rich. Scholars do not yet fully understand how the people process these realities in public fora or build communal interpretations of wealth-driven political power. This paper takes an historical perspective, asking how people across a period of increasing economic polarization and campaign spending made sense of democracy without equality and what they proposed to do about it. To that end, I conduct a fantasy theme analysis of nearly 400 letters-to-the-editor from 12 newspapers spanning the 18 US presidential elections from 1948 to 2016. This analysis contributes to a conceptual model of how citizens felt politics worked in the United States across an era of increasing inequalities. I argue the fantasy theme of affluent domination is one element of a rhetorical vision pitting the interests of the working poor against the wealthy for control of a political system that to some looks remarkably little like democracy.

Reciprocal Communication and Political Deliberation on Twitter

Social media platforms such as Twitter/X are increasingly important for political communication but the empirical question as to whether such communication enhances democratic consensus building (the ideal of deliberative democracy) or instead contributes to societal polarisation via fostering of hate speech and “information disorders” such as echo chambers is worth exploring. Political deliberation involves reciprocal communication between users, but much of the recent research into politics on social media has focused on one-to-many communication, in particular the sharing and diffusion of information on Twitter via retweets. This paper presents a new approach to studying reciprocal political communication on Twitter, with a focus on extending network-analytic indicators of deliberation. We use the Twitter v2 API to collect a new dataset (#debatenight2020) of reciprocal communication on Twitter during the first debate of the 2020 US presidential election and show that a hashtag-based collection alone would have collected only 1% of the debate-related communication. Previous work into using social network analysis to measure deliberation has involved using discussion tree networks to quantify the extent of argumentation (maximum depth) and representation (maximum width); we extend these measures by explicitly incorporating reciprocal communication (via triad census) and the political partisanship of users (inferred via usage of partisan hashtags). Using these methods, we find evidence for reciprocal communication among partisan actors, but also point to a need for further research to understand what forms this communication takes.

Do Campaign Speeches Predict Foreign Policy? An Operational Code and Leadership Trait Analysis of Donald Trump’s MENA Policies

This article investigates whether campaign speeches during the US presidential elections can help predict foreign policy behavior. We use speeches made by Donald J. Trump during his bid for president in 2016. We compare the analysis from 2016 with his actual foreign policy decisions during his tenure, 2017-2020. Operational code analysis and leadership traits analysis approaches are used to analyze candidate Trump’s foreign policy beliefs and strategies associated with them. We use Profiler Plus software to conduct content analysis which produces OCA and LTA results. We use three separate datasets to analyze Trump’s beliefs and traits focusing on his general foreign policy speeches, the MENA region, and a third one only about Islamic State and Syria. Our results show that Trump’s profile indicates a foreign policy orientation that avoids involvement in affairs that are perceived as beyond immediate interests. The consistency between his beliefs and traits during the 2016 campaign and his actual foreign policy behavior leads us to conclude that individual level analysis, and specifically OCA and LTA approaches, are useful tools to analyze, explain and predict foreign policy.

Correcting False Information: Journalistic Coverage During the 2016 and 2020 US Elections

ABSTRACT This study examines journalistic coverage of false information through a qualitative textual analysis of news about four popular false information cases during the 2016 and 2020 US presidential elections: The false claims that (1) the Pope endorsed Donald Trump; (2) Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager ran a pedophilia ring in a pizza shop; (3) the 2020 election was fraudulent and stolen; and (4) liberal politicians and celebrities were Satan worshippers and pedophiles. The analysis identified three dimensions of correction of false information in news coverage. The first dimension examined emphasis on the correct rather than false information. This nuanced past research by considering different practices, such as elaborating on correct information and avoiding the inclusion of incorrect information. The second dimension referred to the tone used to correct false information. The adoption of an assertive tone demonstrated journalists’ use of their voice to authoritatively correct false information. The third dimension entailed the inclusion of sources, which were used to frame correct information consistently with a diversity of audiences’ worldviews. These findings offer a framework to assess journalistic reporting on false information and illuminate strategies to stem its spread.

Geopolitical risk, economic policy uncertainty, and dynamic connectedness between clean energy, conventional energy, and food markets.

The global financial markets suffered unprecedented shocks, leading to significantly increased uncertainty in the markets due to various economic and financial recessions and geopolitical tensions, resulting in substantial fluctuations in market prices. Therefore, this paper aims to identify the response of the clean energy, conventional energy, and food markets to economic uncertainty and political tension while considering the influence of numerous crises and political conflicts. To achieve this, we employ the DCC-GARCH-based connectedness approach and the quantile-on-quantile model on monthly data spanning from May 2008 to June 2023. The results provide evidence of the sensitivity of dynamic volatility spillovers between financial assets to GEPU and GPR during major economic and financial crises and geopolitical events. Notably, this sensitivity increases significantly during the global financial crisis (GFC), the European debt crisis, Brexit, the US presidential election, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Russian-Ukrainian war. However, the investigation of the tail dependence structure reveals that the relationship between uncertainties and total volatility connectedness across various market conditions appears to be asymmetric and heterogeneous. Our findings assist policymakers and green investors in designing the most effective policies to mitigate the impact of uncertainties on both conventional and green investments. This is achieved through insightful knowledge about the primary drivers of contagion among these indices, all while not compromising sustainability goals.

Economic Hardship Increases Justification of Political Violence

ABSTRACT Acts of political violence have reached a new level of intensity with the storming of the United States Capitol in 2021. In this paper, I investigate whether and how economic hardship affects political violence justification. Using an original two-wave panel survey around the 2020 US Presidential election, two studies from the American National Election Survey (ANES), and an original study from Germany, the results show substantial support for political violence justification among respondents. In both countries, political violence justification is strongly and consistently associated with economic hardship. The study thus shows that political violence justification is widespread, not just in polarised two-party systems, but also in other, less polarised multiparty systems.

Candidate Ideology and Vote Choice in the 2020 US Presidential Election

A prominent literature argues that moderate candidates perform better in general elections, but a competing literature that emphasizes partisan loyalties contests this. The 2020 Democratic presidential primary represented an opportunity to speak to these debates due to high voter information about multiple moderate and extreme candidates running in the same election. We present results from two national surveys (total n = 102, 425) that asked how respondents would choose in an election between one of the Democratic candidates and Republican Donald Trump. Our evidence is consistent with moderates having an electoral advantage: more moderate Democratic candidates receive more support against Trump than do more extreme candidates. Providing information through plausible attacks did not change these results. Notably, Sanders had the highest support after the moderates, but this was due to an implausibly large increase in intended turnout among young voters. Inconsistent with theories emphasizing the strength of partisan loyalties, Republican voters explain much of this effect.

Twitter Self-Organization to the Edge of a Phase Transition: Discrete-Time Model and Effective Early Warning Signals in Phase Space

Many real-world systems of various origins are capable of self-organization to the edge of a phase transition, characterized by avalanche-like behavior. Therefore, it is important, by observing the behavior of early warning measures for dynamical series generated by systems, to timely see the early warning signals (precursors) of such self-organization and, if necessary, take preventive measures. To date, convincing evidence of self-organization to the edge of a phase transition has been obtained, but no effective precursors for this self-organization have been found. This research explores precursors for the Twitter self-organization based on the analysis of the behavior of measures directly related to the critical slowdown of the network and measures of the phase space reconstructed by the Takens method for the series of the number of network users creating avalanches of retweets in the network, corresponding to the three debates of the 2016 United States Presidential Election. We hydrated the relevant Tweet IDs, which were obtained from the Harvard Dataverse using the Social Feed Manager, to form this series. Preliminarily, we explore the potential of measures for early detection of self-organization of sandpile cellular automata as systems with Twitter-equivalent self-organization mechanisms. The equivalence is justified in the proposed discrete-time model for Twitter self-organization to the edge of a phase transition. It is found that there are more moments of the Twitter self-organization than the moments of time when debates started, and Twitter stays at the edge of a phase transition longer than the debate lasts. The effective measures, as the measures with the lowest number of false early warning signals, among all studied measures and for all studied systems, are dispersion and correlation dimension. Obtained results are practically important in the design and implementation of early warning systems for the systems with similar mechanisms for sandpile cellular automata self-organization to the edge of a phase transition.

The 2016 US presidential election, opinion polls and the stock market

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of the 2016 presidential election polls on the stock market. Design/methodology/approach The empirical model includes daily stock returns as the dependent variable and past asset prices, 10-year treasury rates, opinion polls and VIX (market uncertainty) as explanatory variables with a one-year lag. The model was estimated using two sets of daily polling data: from July 1, 2015, to November 8, 2016, and from June 1, 2016, to November 8, 2016. Additional descriptive statistics, such as means and standard deviations, were also calculated. Findings The estimated results did not reveal any statistically significant effects of opinion polls in favor of one candidate over another on stock returns. Simple statistical tests, however, show that the market performed better when Trump held a polling advantage over Clinton. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the only study that has examined the effects of the 2016 presidential election polls on the US stock market. This study adds value to the understanding of the relationship between election polls and the stock market in the USA.

Understanding the Escalation статьи in U.S.-Russian Relations during the D. Trump Era: Unpacking the “Split Subject” Phenomenon

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election intensifi ed the divide within American society and the political climate in Washington, causing a signifi cant impact on the relationship between Moscow and Washington. Despite the US political system overcoming the challenges faced during Trump’s presidency, there was also a surge in tensions between the US and Russia. The deterioration of bilateral relations can be attributed to the dysfunctional interagency communication channels and the tightening of sanctions through the CAATSA law. Moscow ultimately shifted its stance from aspiring to normalization to recognizing the likelihood of military-political confrontation. This article presents a hypothesis that comprehensively explains the factors contributing to this shift. The hypothesis underscores the lack of coherence among American political leaders, as four unique interest groups – President Trump, Republican hawks, oppositional bureaucrats, and Democratic Congress members – all contribute to shaping US policy toward Russia. Each group advances its specifi c objectives, sometimes joining forces to bypass the president’s policies. Consequently, a “split subject” phenomenon emerges in US-Russian aff airs. The author concludes that the lack of constructive dialogue with Washington during Trump’s presidency was due to the “split subject.” The victory of J. Biden in the 2020 elections and the alignment of American bipartisan elites amid the Russian-Ukrainian confl ict temporarily shifted this phenomenon to the background. Nevertheless, the author raises the question of whether this “cleavage” might reemerge if Trump or his close associates win the 2024 US presidential election.