Campaign Slogan Research Articles

Identification with Characters of a National Narrative Health Communication Campaign Targeting Type 2 Diabetes

ABSTRACT Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) has a high prevalence in Germany. Tailored health communication campaigns are part of preventing T2DM at a societal level, with narrative approaches as a promising communication strategy. The aim of this study was to qualitatively examine identification with characters as a potential narrative effect mechanism within a national T2DM communication campaign (Slogan: “Diabetes – not only a question of type”). In doing so, characters’ liking and perceived similarity were explored as antecedents of identification. For this purpose, nine focus groups comprising a total of 76 participants diagnosed with T2DM were conducted. Two of these focus groups consisted entirely of participants of Turkish descent. An assessment was developed to measure the extent to which participants liked, perceived themselves to be similar to, and identified with different characters presented via three videoclip formats (live action, animated cartoons, and celebrity testimonials) from a national diabetes communication campaign. Live action and celebrity testimonial characters were mostly perceived as likeable. However, level of identification was low, and participants felt an overall lack of similarity regarding both personal and disease-related characteristics as compared to these characters. Animated cartoons were perceived as less stigmatizing, but also as less engaging. The study indicates that liking without a feeling of similarity to a character is not sufficient to elicit identification. Further, the reinforcement of harmful T2DM stereotypes should be avoided in health communications to prevent reactance and to increase generalizability.

‘Telling China’s Story Well’ as propaganda campaign slogan: International, domestic and the pandemic

The article critically examines ‘Telling China’s Story Well’ (TCSW), a popular propaganda campaign slogan proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013. Drawing on theories about storytelling and propaganda and using the COVID-19 as a contextualised example, the paper discusses how the slogan was adapted into ‘Telling China’s Anti-pandemic Story Well’ to mobilise domestic and external propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the pandemic. We argue that TCSW should be understood as a well-crafted political watchword which promotes and commands strategic narratives of doing propaganda. It has the rhetorical power to integrate and reinvigorate domestic and external propaganda, and to facilitate their convergence. Adapting this slogan to mobilise propaganda campaigns of national or global importance and interest demonstrates the CCP’s ambition to harness strategic storytelling to improve the coherence, effectiveness and reputation of its propaganda at home and abroad.

An Analysis of the Evaluation of Islamic Laws in Pakistan from 1988 to 1999

In Pakistan, there has always been a strong desire for Islamic law, or Sharia. The Islamic nature of Pakistan's political structure was discussed as soon as the country was established. One of the primary reasons that the process of drafting a constitution was delayed was the place of religion in the political structure. Islam emerged as the primary determining element in 1949 with the ratification of the Objectives Resolution. Still, there was a persistent push for further Islamization of the legislation. Different Islamic laws were introduced at different times. In this regard, the General Zia era is more notable. This article aims to highlight the Islamic legislation that was implemented following the reign of Zia. According to the paper, Zia's death did not mark the end of the process of Islamization. It remained a popular subject, especially as a potent campaign slogan. IJI, which Nawaz Sharif led, and later PML-N were more interested in employing religious rhetoric during elections; PPP, on the other hand, also occasionally employed religious cards.

Religious Scriptures in Indonesia focusing on Semantic Studies towards unity

This study is a literature review study of recognized religious scriptures in Indonesia with a focus on semantic studies of the word ‘love’ words using NVivo 12 Plus software designed specifically to support deep levels of data analysis. The literature search applied the keyword ‘love’ in Indonesian unless there was no scripture available in Indonesian. This study research ascertained that in all the holy scriptures of recognized religions practicing in Indonesia, the word ‘love’ was obtainable through a text search using software NVivo 12 Plus. It uncovered that in the Holy Bible the word appears as many as 495 times, in the Holy Qur'an 58 times, in the Vedas 241 times, in the Tripitaka 1705 times, and in Si Shu 571 times. Semantic studies of the word ‘love’ in the original language of religious scriptures in Indonesia found the words Ahav, Hesed, Agape, and Philia in Christianity, Hubb, Wadda, and Rahmah in Islam, Prema in Hinduism, Metta in Buddhism, and Ren in Confucianism. This study explains that the term ‘love’ thus exists in every religious scripture in Indonesia and can be a campaign slogan which could be implemented to increase tolerance between diverse religious communities in Indonesia that are plural and often multicultural and this can hopefully play a huge role in building a sense of religious community in order to increase national unity on the whole. This study explains that ‘love’ exists in every religious scripture in Indonesia and can be used in any campaigns implemented to increase tolerance and harmony between religiously diverse communities in Indonesia that are considered to be pluralistically inclined. This will support the notion of having a stronger sense of religious harmony in the community so as to increase and promote the notion of national unity through love.

President Muhammadu Buhari’s Administration and the Change Mantra in Nigeria

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country and its largest economy is credited with an abundance of natural and human resource endowments placing it potentially, among resource-rich nations and raising hopes of its development potentials. Contrary to this potentiality, the country remains underdeveloped with a large portion of the population living below all indices of human development. Democracy offers hope for pragmatic changes to leadership and government policies in society’s quest for change and stability. It was on this basis that numerous disenchanted Nigerians embraced the prospect of ‘change’ put forward as campaign slogan by Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress against the ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party in the run-ups to the 2015 elections. Consequently, Mr. Buhari was sworn in as President on the back of his change mantra, on the 29th of May 2015 with his party remarkably defeating an incumbent president. The party was re–elected for another four years in 2019 arguably aided by factors of incumbency and some remnant of civil optimism. After the expiration of his eight year tenure, there are questions on the performance of the Buhari administration that need exploration, viz-a-viz performance to voters’ expectations; the party’s delivery relative to party manifesto; and public disposition to, and perception of standard of living under the administration. Eight years after this government, were they able to introduce the much needed change? How far did they go in fulfilling some of their laudable promises as contained in their manifesto? Did they live up to the expectations of the citizens? This paper seeks to answer these questions through evaluation of the major promises made to the citizens by the ‘Change Mantra’ government. The social contract theory was employed. The paper relies on secondary means of data collection and is analyzed using descriptive analysis and narrative report. The study concludes that the Government did not live up to the citizen’s expectations and most of their promises were never accomplished. The study recommends that corrupt politicians should be jailed to serve as a deterrent to others. Our political culture should be changed; citizens should begin to demand for dividends of democracy from their elected representatives

Religion and identity polarisation: A slight note from the frontier region

This article examined the recent emergence of the national and international issue of religious polarisation and identity, which affects some groups’ populism and fanaticism. Regarding social phenomena, religion and identity are intertwined like the two sides of a coin. This discourse has an impact how to interpret diversity on religious issues that are caused by political influences. Given the polarisation of identity politics and religion, the national and state campaign slogan ‘unity in diversity’ is merely wishful thinking. The polarisation of identity and religion is heavily implicated in the Indonesia–Philippines border case; consequently, in some instances, the ‘seeds’ of these cases are discovered, eventually resulting in group fanaticism. This article employed the historical way of writing while also taking a social science angle that interacts with the research being done. For some communities, religion and identity may take on symbolic meaning, affecting how well they adapt and are accepted. However, the qualities of a community group or region are also shaped by historical events. According to the study’s findings, religion and ethnic identity have played important roles in long-standing historical processes and impacted them. This study is anticipated to ‘suppress’ the problem of political division involving religion and identity because the identification of ‘border’ communities depends not only on entity and identity issues but also on the community’s culture.Contribution: The contribution in this study is that it has an impact on religious issues and cultural identity relations perspectives.

Structural-Semantic Features of Advertising Slogans in French

The study examined structural and semantic features of advertising slogans in French. The relevance of the conducted research is determined by the unflagging interest of representatives of various fields in advertising in general and in the advertising slogan in particular. The authors identified the main methods and techniques used to create an advertising slogan in French, and also revealed how their use affects the semantics of the statement, and, consequently, the perception of all advertising and the formation of a positive image of the company producing goods and services. The research found that the effectiveness of the advertising campaign slogan largely depends on the visual range and auditory series. Also, it is indicated that in the press, in which there is no possibility of placing any graphic image, there is a big focus on a play of words, built on polysemy, homonymy, allusive contexts and other stylistic resources.

Close, but No Cigar

Close, but No Cigar

Discourse Framing of Nigeia’s Developmental Issues and Government’s Interventionist Policies in Selected Televised National Addresses of President Muhammadu Buhari (2015 -2021)

Public addresses constitute potent platforms through which public figures review their policies and articulate their plans. They provide insights to the priorities of the government, elicit public sympathy and support for the government. Contrarily, there has been a seeming dissonance between the national addresses of President Muhammadu Buhari and the reality of the Nigerian citizenry. To this effect, this research purposed to conduct a critical discourse analysis of President Buhari’s national addresses against the backdrop of development in Nigeria between 2015 and 2021. The research explicated the interplay between the concepts of language and ideology in text, for the enactment of human development. The general population of this research comprised all the 27 televised speeches delivered by President Muhammadu Buhari in Nigeria from 2015-2021. The targeted population of 20 national addresses were adopted using a purposive sampling technique. The addresses are the Inaugural Day address of 2015, all New Year’s Day addresses, Democracy Day addresses and all Independence Day addresses. Coding sheet was used to gather data directly from the original full text discourses of the President, as presented to the citizenry. The research findings show that the President’s discourses framed national development issues as direct and key responsibilities of the government which require strategic, sincere and effective interventionist policies. They also revealed nine recurrent themes in the President’s discourses to depict the President’s intense focus on national development in tandem with his pre-election campaign slogan of Security, Economy and Anti-corruption (SEA). The research uncovered linguistic frames comprising pragmatic speech acts of locution, illocution and perlocution in the President’s discourses, to highly and frequently reiterate his ideologies in ensuring national growth and development. The findings also revealed that the President’s discourses framed and propagated ideologies, dissimilar to his military antecedents, for the advancement of his national development interventionist policies. The research concluded that the interplay among President Muhammadu Buhari’s ideology and human development policies in the text of his national addresses between 2015 and 2021, consciously construed his administration’s interventionist policies for the enactment of socio political development against the excruciating challenges in the Nigerian nation. Thus, this research recommended that political leaders should ensure that subsisting problems and those envisaged as the foundation of social order in their societies; the value systems appropriate for social justice, wealth creation and distribution, social efficiency with moral sensitivity and concern for the common good, as deduced from the knowledge of shared values with their citizenry, are pragmatically tackled not only in the discourses, but as well experientially. This research also recommended that politicians and their speech writers should effectively and positively adopt the use of discourse framing to promote societal progressive growth.

The Politics of White Rights: Race, Justice, and Integrating Alabama’s Schools by Joseph Bagley

Reviewed by: The Politics of White Rights: Race, Justice, and Integrating Alabama’s Schools by Joseph Bagley Michael T. Bertrand The Politics of White Rights: Race, Justice, and Integrating Alabama’s Schools. By Joseph Bagley. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018. 304 pp. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-8203-5483-5. Joseph Bagley has written a thought-provoking, exhaustive, and depressing history of public school desegregation in the state of Alabama. Beginning with the promise of 1954’s Brown v. Board case and continuing through a litany of lesser-known yet significant Supreme Court decisions that concludes nearly twenty years later, the author tells a story that is tragic rather than uplifting. The cast of characters in his journey include governors James “Big Jim” Folsom, John Patterson, George Wallace, Lurleen Wallace, Albert Brewer, and a George Wallace reprise. Also featured are civil rights attorneys, federal court judges, and segregationist leaders of both state and local variety. The lawyers and jurists play leading roles, but it is the white supremacists who steal the show, for the lesson learned in this bittersweet tale is that Massive Resistance to racial integration never died; it simply adapted in ways that made it more effective. Perhaps a paradox that only a southerner can appreciate, it integrated itself into the legal system. But it did so only by observing the letter and not the spirit of court orders. As Bagley notes throughout the book, the goal of various governors, school board officials, and other lesser notables was to satisfy the bare minimum of requirements and never to go “beyond the law” (181). This double entendre of sorts is meaningful. It put the emphasis on “law and order,” a phrase not to be confused with Richard Nixon’s later campaign slogan that brought to mind negative images of [End Page 267] urban unrest (8). This usage was somewhat distinctive to Alabama, and the underlying message was never surrender, just retreat to a winnable position. Narrating the early history of the state’s segregationist response to civil rights activism, Bagley enumerates the activities of diehards such as “Dynamite” Bob Chambliss, Asa “Ace” Carter, and other nameless individuals responsible, respectively, for the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, the Nat “King” Cole assault, the mob incitement over Autherine Lucy, the beating of Fred Shuttlesworth, the castration of J. Edward “Judge” Aaron, and the attacks on the Freedom Riders. “Respectable” segregationist leaders understood that such violence was self-defeating. The days of Eugene “Bull” Connor and Jim Clark were past. The new strategy of defiance required mastering all possible legal means toward obstruction. Bagley has compiled and combed through a massive and impressive amount of primary materials to reconstruct the Heart of Dixie’s later and lasting reiteration of Massive Resistance. His reliance on manuscript collections, trial records and case files, government documents, commission reports, organization and personal papers, memoirs, oral histories, state archives, and newspaper files allows him to provide detailed accounts of the machinations that took place both inside and outside of courtrooms and classrooms. It is a narrative that makes sense of legal briefs and court directives, with each chapter examining a particular two-to-three year period (save for chapter one, which goes from 1954 to 1960, and the epilogue, which serves as a postmortem, putting the period from 1973 to 2017 into the historical context that he has provided). Generally devoid of legalese, Bagley provides access to the meetings, trials, legislative halls, school-board offices, and judicial chambers so instrumental to the era’s desegregation decisions. The story is one that traces white uncertainty about Brown to a certain empty phrase open to interpretation and delay—“with all deliberate speed.” Segregationist academies emerged at the same time that the state board of education employed tokenism, and governors Patterson, Wallace, Wallace, Brewer, and Wallace (again) predicted that any moves more extensive would lead to white flight. [End Page 268] White Alabamians would never accept attending schools where large numbers of their Black counterparts would be their classmates. By the end of the 1960s, impatient federal judges finally called Alabama’s deliberate deliberateness and ordered compulsory compliance. As the state’s politicians had predicted (encouraged?), white flight soared...

“If That Be Treason, Let Them Make the Most of It!”: Olin Downes, the Spanish Civil War, and Civil Liberties in the United States

“If That Be Treason, Let Them Make the Most of It!”: Olin Downes, the Spanish Civil War, and Civil Liberties in the United States

Make America Great Again? How Do We Explain Trumpism

Introduction. Donald Trump was the nadir for the Republican Party; his election in 2016 and his subsequent tenure as President from 2017 to 2021 was the low point of the evolutionary descent and destruction of the party. When Ronald Reagan was elected the 40th president in 1980 at his inaugural address, he warned the nation: “government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem”. One of his first legislative actions was to cut federal taxes on the wealthiest Americans. From that hour on, the Republican Party set their mantra as “lower taxes and shrink government, at all levels” (except for National Defense). Since Ronald Reagan’s Presidency, the Republican Party knows only one policy, cut taxes and shrink government; with that as its most sacred Creed, the party has blocked itself from dealing with any national needs. Methods and materials. The methods used in the article are comparative, analytical, and functional systematic. The materials used were: 1) the official documents of President R. Reagan Library; 2) secondary accounts of contemporary events; 3) the materials of US media and selected articles of political experts. Analysis. The article provides some reflections on the evolutionary political process inside the Republican Party from R. Reagan till D. Trump. The authors analyze the context of political and ideological crisis, the new wave of conservative leaders, and the reasons for the structural crisis of the Republican Party. Special attitude devoted to D. Trump phenomena and the description of his political mind. T. Heed analyzed the main trends of the development Republican Party in the last 30 years. He also selected some historical and current sources from mass media for identification of the controversy inside the GOP. A. Kubyshkin analyzed the connection inside the US party system with global challenges for US policy in the domestic arena and on the international scene. Results. D. Trump’s bankruptcy of the Republican Party is perhaps best shown by the platform he ordered for the 2020 campaign. There should be none. This action best describes what Trump did to the GOP. By Trump’s command, all the Republican party need offer was Trump. The only campaign slogan needed was to support the beloved leader. Only he could heal the nation. No statement of policies was needed; there were none. The Republican Party was left with only Trump as the one all and be all.

HIV-related public stigma and knowledge regarding the campaign slogan "undetectable=untransmittable" among Japanese people

Objectives This study targeted adult males and females living in Japan with the following three objectives. The first was to clarify the public stigma toward people living with HIV (PLWH). The second was to clarify changes in public stigma by gathering information about the "undetectable=untransmittable" (U=U) campaign. The third was to clarify the relationship between changes in public stigma and contributing factors, and the experiences of PLWH.Methods We conducted a cross-sectional online survey in September, 2019 for male and female internet research monitors in their 20s to 60s who were heterosexual, not HIV-positive, and not acquainted with PLWH. In total, the results from 2,268 people were analyzed. Public stigma toward PLWH was measured by a modified vignette for PLWH using a social distance scale for people with mental illness. The social distance scale included "becoming a neighbor," "greeting and talking," "asking them to take care of your children," "becoming friends," "becoming colleagues at work," and "marrying your relatives." We provided information on "U=U" to participants and then evaluated the changes in acceptance of each social distance factor into four categories: "unacceptable," "acceptable ⇒ unacceptable," "unacceptable ⇒ acceptable," and " acceptable."Results All items in the social distance scale except "greeting and talking" exhibited significantly positive changes (male odds ratio 1.76 to 4.18, female odds ratio 2.25 to 7.00) after providing information. The factor most often deemed "unacceptable" was "marrying your relatives," in 57.5% of men and 58.1% of women; 37.0% of men and 37.3% of women answered "asking them to take care of your children;" and 19.0% of men and 11.1% of women answered "becoming friends." Multinomial logistic regression analysis demonstrated that experience with PLWH in both men and women was associated with "marrying your relatives." The experience of watching television and listening to radio programs, watching movies and plays, and reading books related to PLWH was significantly related to the category of "unacceptable" compared with "acceptable." (Male odds ratio 0.38 to 0.63, female odds ratio 0.50 to 0.56).Conclusion The acceptance of PLWH was low in personal matters, such as family and child-rearing. The explanation of "U=U" improved acceptance in each social distance factor. Independent experiences, such as viewing, appreciation, and reading about PLWH, improved acceptance.

Art & Alchemy: North Carolina Repair Professionals

Art & AlchemyNorth Carolina Repair Professionals Katy Clune (bio) and Julia Gartrell (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Marshallberg Computer Repair, Marshallberg. All photographs by Katy Clune unless otherwise noted. [End Page 40] drive through any town, anywhere, and among the essential food stores and gas stations there are repair shops. "There will always be a need for somebody to repair broken stuff," said ceramics restorer Lenore Guston. "Because we're humans, we're breaking stuff all the time." Over the last year and a half, with the support of an Archie Green Fellowship from the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center, we set out to discover the current state of repair industries in North Carolina. Often when something is fixed the repair itself is invisible—the chip is polished away, the paint perfectly matched. We wanted to know about the stewards of our belongings, the folks who know how to reverse our mistakes and erase the imprint of time passing. This set of twenty interviews, conducted between September 2020 and July 2021, opens the workshop door and steps behind the customer counter to reveal the artistry, satisfaction, and expressions of care behind repair. Our collaboration and interest in this project grew out of our shared refusal of throwaway consumer culture and admiration of traditional craft methods. We met in 2016 at The Scrap Exchange, a creative reuse center in Durham, North Carolina, that diverts tons of waste from the landfill by accepting, sorting, and reselling. Julia is a sculptor whose work explores how our cultural relationship to material objects has changed since the rise of global manufacturing. In 2019, she launched the Radical Repair Workshop in a revamped vintage camper trailer. This gallery-meets-workshop is a mobile public art project that teaches simple repair skills and invites the public to donate their broken objects. "The goal, despite having the word repair in the title, is not necessarily to bring things back to their working order," Julia told me when I interviewed her about the project in January 2020. "It's designed to explore how sentimental objects can turn towards sculpture." Today, when it is often cheaper to replace an item than to fix it, specialty skills and loving care for belongings work together to resist the waste of capitalism. And, it turns out, it's an immensely satisfying way to earn a living, though it is challenging and sometimes lonely. Any nostalgia or romantic ideals we may have had before our fieldwork began were quickly wiped away, hastened by the challenges posed by the pandemic. As a folklorist, I am trained [End Page 41] to have meaningful conversations across divides, but our face masks and outdoor interview protocols made political differences newly visible—and sometimes insurmountable. (There were candidates we could not include because of their lack of COVID-19 precautions.) Despite the difficulties of cold-calling and setting up visits, meeting these generous strangers, and digging around their envy-inducing workshops, was an unexpected pandemic lifeline for both of us. Click for larger view View full resolution Wood cutting templates hang in the workshop of Y & J Furniture, Durham. Call it naivety, but Julia and I did not expect that it would be challenging to find interview candidates who were not white men over fifty. Many of these "handymen" fell into their fields during the Vietnam War era, often by chance, but found enough success to develop and sustain a niche business. Repair work is difficult—the pay is usually only enough to get by, store owners can be wary of training staff (who may one day become the competition), and it can be hard to find community, especially if you are a woman or a person of color. We made special effort to include voices from many backgrounds in this collection, but readily acknowledge their absences. We also could not have predicted the wider relevance the subject of repair would hold for our country in 2020 and 2021. Among so many other things, the pandemic exposed our need to be more self-reliant, and laid bare how much about our country needs fixing. President Biden's campaign slogan "Build Back Better" addressed this...

Joining efforts to destroy a mighty empire: the Delphic oracle reloaded!

Whether in short or long term, it seems that history always repeats itself! We started in 2011 under the announcement of another collective suicide attempt by organized by Merseyside Skeptics Society, with followers in various cities all over the world! The reasoning behind this movement is quite clear: if homeopathic medicines are highly diluted, then it can not be found one even molecule of the supposed active substance, inside it. Hence the campaign slogan: Homeopathy: there is nothing in it! 
 ...
 It seems that the story wants to repeat again! If we join efforts to satisfy the skeptics, the prophecy of the Skeptics’ Oracle will be fulfilled: "respect the Avogadro’s limit and we no longer fight against homeopathy”! If we go forward with this fight, we will destroy ourselves, the homeopathy and all science behind the high dilutions, leaving nothing for the skeptics do, unless, quietly to observe our self-destruction!
 ...
 If we want to get into a true battle, then we should review and reflect on our scientific approach to the phenomenon of the HD and homeopathy. And we don’t need to bother in requesting a space in the universe of science, because this decision is not entitled to the skeptics. Further, this place is already booked since a long time! We should only be dedicated to the difficult task of uncovering the phenomenon behind the HD and Homeopathy, in order to fill our space in an honorable manner!

Studying the Community of Trump Supporters on Twitter during the 2020 US Presidential Election via Hashtags #maga and #trump2020

(1) The study investigated the social network surrounding the hashtags #maga (Make America Great Again, the campaign slogan popularized by Donald Trump during his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns) and #trump2020 on Twitter to better understand Donald Trump, his community of supporters, and their political discourse and activities in the political context of the 2020 US presidential election. (2) Social network analysis of a sample of 220,336 tweets from 96,820 unique users, posted between 27 October and 2 November 2020 (i.e., one week before the general election day) was conducted. (3) The most active and influential users within the #maga and #trump2020 network, the likelihood of those users being spamming bots, and their tweets’ content were revealed. (4) The study then discussed the hierarchy of Donald Trump and the problematic nature of spamming bot detection, while also providing suggestions for future research.

Advancing gender claims in post-pink tide Brazil: Bolsonaro’s project for women

ABSTRACT Despite its illiberal tendencies, the Bolsonaro presidency, particularly the Christian Evangelical head of its women’s policy agency, does have a specific agenda to advance substantive gender claims. The current government’s rejects strongly feminist public policy claims, equating feminism to a radical leftist subversion of the Brazilian family and the country’s societal values. Feminine-centric public policy, in contrast, is portrayed as one of the key paths to restore a nation in which, as Bolsonaro’s campaign slogan epitomizes, “Brazil is above all things, and God is above all”.

Making America Exceptional Again: Donald Trump's Traditionalist Jeremiad, Civil Religion, and the Politics of Resentment

AbstractDonald Trump's campaign slogan to “Make America Great Again” captivated the imagination of millions of Americans by contextualizing disparate sources of social resentment as emblematic of a broader story of American decline. Employing a “traditionalist civil religious jeremiad,” Trump called for a reassertion of American exceptionalism, and extolled a romanticized golden age predating transformative social changes (e.g., sexuality, gender roles, racial equality). As such, his rhetoric legitimized the defense of white male privilege as a vital component of this restoration. While this use of civil religious themes emboldened those who harbor prejudicial views, it alienated others who interpret such rhetoric as an assault on the soul of the nation. Relying on a unique module within the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we demonstrate that adherence to the tenets of American civil religion significantly exacerbated the effects of symbolic racism and modern sexism on support for Trump.

A cartography of controversy concerning MAGA: political rhetoric, racism, and symbolism in schools

This study explored incidents in schools involving the controversial campaign slogan, Make America Great Again (MAGA). Using a cartography of controversies approach, we located news reports to understand how educators, students, and families engaged with MAGA as a cultural symbol. In addition to mapping the location of each incident and grade level, we interpreted news reports through a cultural studies lens during weekly meetings. While discussing MAGA related incidents in schools we scripted a blogcast as we worked thematically with data. Our interpretations coalesced into three key findings. First, MAGA’s symbolism, as an extension of Trumpian rhetoric, aroused emotions. Second, actors wielding the symbols exhibited entitlement racism. Third, those provoked to act in response to fear and anger faced a double-bind—they were at risk of punishment for reacting to MAGA and at risk of harm (i.e. political trauma) if they ignored it. We discuss the implications of the findings for educational leadership and offer recommendations for future research.

Studying Moral-based Differences in the Framing of Political Tweets

In this paper, we study the moral framing of political content on Twitter. Specifically, we examine differences in moral framing in two datasets: (i) tweets from US-based politicians annotated with political affiliation and (ii) COVID-19 related tweets in German from followers of the leaders of the five major Austrian political parties. Our research is based on recent work that introduces an unsupervised approach to extract framing bias and intensity in news using a dictionary of moral virtues and vices. In this paper, we use a more extensive dictionary and adapt it to German-language tweets. Overall, in both datasets, we observe a moral framing that is congruent with the public perception of the political parties. In the US dataset, democrats have a tendency to frame tweets in terms of care, while loyalty is a characteristic frame for republicans. In the Austrian dataset, we find that the followers of the governing conservative party emphasize care, which is a key message and moral frame in the party's COVID-19 campaign slogan. Our work complements existing studies on moral framing in social media. Also, our empirical findings provide novel insights into moral-based framing on COVID-19 in Austria.