Obama Campaign Research Articles

Critical Discourse Analysis of Barack Obama's campaign speech

Critical Discourse Analysis of Barack Obama's campaign speech

Predicting Elections with Big Data

Abstract: A rapidly growing sector of the Indian political landscape is data consulting services for political campaigns. The US Presidential election served as a major catalyst for the emergence of data-driven political campaigns, as Barack Obama's campaign managers utilised big data to their advantage. Since then, larger data banks have been developed by election campaigns in numerous countries, including India. The BJP relied heavily on big data and the campaign managers to create its political plans for the 2014 general election. The BJP's resounding victory in this election has created enormous new opportunities for political marketing in India. Big Data analytics approaches aid campaign managers in analysing larger databases and developing the most effective voting-winning strategy. Because of this country's large and highly diversified population, the methods of such microtargeting political campaigns were unthinkable and alien to the largest democracy in the world. This essay is a modest attempt to comprehend the importance of big data analytics in contemporary Indian election campaigns.

Learning Hidden Influences in Large-Scale Dynamical Social Networks: A Data-Driven Sparsity-Based Approach, in Memory of Roberto Tempo

The processes of information diffusion across social networks (for example, the spread of opinions and the formation of beliefs) are attracting substantial interest in disciplines ranging from behavioral sciences to mathematics and engineering (see "Summary"). Since the opinions and behaviors of each individual are infl uenced by interactions with others, understanding the structure of interpersonal infl uences is a key ingredient to predict, analyze, and, possibly, control information and decisions [1]. With the rapid proliferation of social media platforms that provide instant messaging, blogging, and other networking services (see "Online Social Networks") people can easily share news, opinions, and preferences. Information can reach a broad audience much faster than before, and opinion mining and sentiment analysis are becoming key challenges in modern society [2]. The first anecdotal evidence of this fact is probably the use that the Obama campaign made of social networks during the 2008 U.S. presidential election [3]. More recently, several news outlets stated that Facebook users played a major role in spreading fake news that might have infl uenced the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election [4]. This can be explained by the phenomena of homophily and biased assimilation [5]-[7] in social networks, which correspond to the tendency of people to follow the behaviors of their friends and establish relationships with like-minded individuals.

Whitewashing: How Obama Used Implicit Racial Cues as a Defense Against Political Rumors

Although Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, some Whites nevertheless penalized him because of his race. In part, these penalties involved persistent rumors about his citizenship and religion. How did the Obama campaign respond to these rumors? We argue that the Obama campaign drew attention to his bi-racial ancestry and highlighted his association with Whites in order to curry favor with this constituency. We also argue that Republicans and conservatives were most receptive to this “Whitewashing” strategy, although Democrats and liberals were not immune. We test these hypotheses with a content analysis of presidential ads from the 2008 general election, an online experiment manipulating the racial content of an Obama ad, and two nationally representative surveys. Our hypotheses are generally confirmed and suggest that Obama succeeded in part because he accommodated, rather than challenged, existing racial hierarchies.

Implicature in Barrack Obama’s Presidential Candicacy Announcement Speech

This research describes the use of implicatures. This study aims to see the message in Barack Obama's campaign speech. Furthermore, this study uses the implicature theory proposed by Grice and George Yule, the language function theory proposed by Geoffrey Leech and complemented by the ethnographic theory of communication by Dell Hymes. The data is taken from Barack Obama's utterances delivered in a campaign speech in Springfield, Illinois, USA on February 10, 2007. This research follows the research phase proposed by Sudaryanto. At the basic stage of the data, the writer used the listening method and the technique of listening to the free and speaking competently. At the analysis, the researcher used the pragmatic matching method. Based on the analysis, the researcher found forty-two implicatures contained in the thirty-eight teachings of Barack Obama in the campaign speech. In addition, each implicature has a different function and purpose.

'What He Said...': The Transformative Potential of the Use of Copyrighted Content in Political Campaigns, or, How a Win for Mitt Romney Might Have Been a Victory for Free Speech

In January 2012 Mitt Romney’s campaign received a cease-and-desist letter charging, among other things, that its use of news footage concerning Newt Gingrich’s ethics problems in the House of Representatives constituted a violation of NBC’s copyright. This is just the latest such charge and came amidst similar allegations against the Gingrich and Bachmann campaigns and in the wake of similar allegations against both the McCain and Obama campaigns in 2008. Such allegations have plagued political campaigns as far back as Reagan’s in 1984. The existing literature is nearly devoid of a consideration of such uses as political speech protected by the First Amendment. Rather, scholars tend to focus on fair use. Courts have considered this question very rarely and also tend to concentrate on fair use. Because these cases rarely progress to decisions, there is little to be said of what courts have done but much to be said of what they ought to. This Article engages in a thought experiment of laying out the legal analysis in the case that will never be — NBC v. Romney — arguing that when copyrighted content is marshaled to advance a political message, copyright ought to yield to the First Amendment.

Politicians and political parties’ use of social media in-between elections

Digital transformation changes the relationship between citizens and politics. The observation of this nexus is highly relevant for representative democracy. After the successful 2008 Obama campaign, a vast body of research that explores how and why politicians use social media has emerged. However, we still know very little about how social media are being adopted and used in-between elections, and still less yet about what this means for political representation. Therefore, this special issue brings together innovative research that focuses on how the use of social media is impacting upon the relationship between politicians and political parties, and citizens. First, we discuss some pros and cons of this transformation in the context of the relevant literature and, especially, in relation to Stephen Coleman’s concept of ‘direct representation’. Finally, we discuss the findings and merits of the contributions and what the issue adds to our understanding of the phenomenon to the state of research.

Social Media – A Vehicle for Personalisation in Politics? Political communication before the 2017 parliamentary elections in Iceland

Politics are becoming increasingly personalized, the focus shifting from party policies to individual candidates. Throughout the world, social media plays a significant role in this transformation (Enjolras & Karlsen,2016; Garzia, 2011; Kruikemeier, et.al., 2016; Larsson, 2014; Small 2010; McAllister,2007; Meeks, 2017). The most common definition of the term personalisation phrases it simply as a dichotomous relationship between the importance placed on the candidate on the one hand and the party on the other (Chan, 2018). Compared to other countries, Icelanders are very active on social media with 92% of the population owning a Facebook account, while 62% use Snapchat. Other social media are used less, Instagram 44% and Twitter 20% (Gallup, 2017). Electoral volatility has furthermore been on the rise in the last two decades with diminishing party loyalty and partisan dealignment (Harðarson, 2008, 2016). Dealignment in turn creates a dynamic context for personalization and leadership focus vis-á-vis party attachments (Garzia, 2011; Garzia, et. al. 2018). This rising trend of dealignment, as Lobo (2018) has pointed out, correlates with the phenomenon of personalization (Lobo, 2018). Precisely this tendency was felt in Iceland before the 2017 parliamentary elections, e.g. in the case of the now prime minister of Iceland, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, who had become more popular in the polls than her party (Jóhannsson, 2016. Magnússon, 2017). Traditional media and their news values are partly responsible for keeping up the visibility of political leaders on the news agenda, as normally they are considered more newsworthy than ordinary MPs or candidates. Thus, personalization is enhanced by the media, not only traditional media but social media as well. There are two cornerstones to all recent research into social media and politics: the Obama campaign of 2008 and the Trump campaign of 2016. These elections were not exclusively held nor won on social media but innovated its use to attract more attention and votes (Chadwick, 2017). However, Scandinavian research has shown that in the fragmented hybrid media environment in European parliamentary democracies, social media have as well become a vehicle for non- leaders and newcomers who use these platforms proportionally more than their leaders (Blach-Örsten, et.al, 2016; Larson and Moe, 2014). The aim of this paper is to find out if politician´s usage of social media, not only of leaders, contributes to the personalization of the Icelandic political system, which has historically been party centred (Harðarson, 2008). This will be done through a content analysis of the posts on social media of top two candidates of every party in every constituency before the 2017 parliamentary elections and with post- election semi-standardized interviews with 5 party officials. We will explore whether social media is more party, or candidate centred, gaining insight into why that is and what we can expect to see in the future through the interviews. As no research exists on the effect of social media on personalization in Iceland, this will be the first attempt at such analysis.

By ground or by air? Voter mobilization during the United States’ 2008 presidential campaign

ABSTRACTAggregate studies find no effect of campaign advertising on voter turnout in the United States, thereby calling into question experimental and survey-based studies that produce strong turnout effects. In revisiting the debate over the impact of campaign ads, this paper examines the effects of both TV campaign advertising and campaign field offices on aggregate voter turnout during the 2008 US presidential election campaign. In contrast to previous studies, our analysis finds that both campaign field offices and campaign advertising help to stimulate turnout, although the effect of campaign field offices is more robust to alternative model specifications. We also find that only Obama's field offices had any discernible impact on aggregate voter turnout, thereby reinforcing the narrative that the Obama campaign had a superior ground game in 2008.

Encouraging Identification with the Larger Campaign Narrative: Grassroots Organizing Texts in Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential Campaign

Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign motivated thousands of people to train, organize, and recruit volunteers to get involved at the grassroots level. In this essay, I study a set of training manuals used during the 2008 Obama campaign and explore how four key rhetorical devices encouraged volunteers to identify strongly with the campaign. Using Kenneth Burke’s theory of identification, I analyze how (a) “Respect. Empower. Include.,” (b) the Story of Self, (c) volunteer recruitment and retention, and (d) the Obama “O” symbol fostered a sense of mission and commitment to the larger campaign narrative.

Romney, Obama, and the 47%: gaffes and representative anecdotes in the 2012 presidential campaign

ABSTRACTThis article uses the vocabulary provided by scholarship on gaffes, narrative paradigm, and representative anecdote to suggest that both the Obama and Romney campaigns employed Mitt Romney's leaked “47%” comment as a Burkean representative anecdote in the 2012 election. The elevation of the leaked comment was possible because the gaffe held narrative fidelity for the stories proposed by both campaigns, but narrative coherence and transcendent values became contentious aspects of the respective narratives. Critically analyzing divergent meanings assigned to the leaked comment opens space to discuss the role gaffes play in campaign narratives, complicates contemporary understanding of gaffes and their integration into broader political campaigns, and illuminates the impact of particular rhetorical constructions on campaigns and public policy.

Modern Sexism and the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election: Reassessing the Casualties of the “War on Women”

The 2012 contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney included fierce dialogue about women and issues typically connected to them. The inflammatory comments that conservative radio-show host Rush Limbaugh made about female law student Sandra Fluke and the Affordable Health Care Act's (ACA) requirements that all workplaces cover contraceptives were central topics in the news. The controversy literally followed Romney in the form of “Pillamina,” a human-sized costume designed to look like a pack of birth control pills that shadowed the candidate's summer swing state tour. While “Pillamina” was the work of Planned Parenthood's Action Fund, the Obama campaign also took aim at Romney on this issue, running a television commercial featuring “Dawn and Alex,” two women talking about how out of touch Romney is with women's health issues. The Romney campaign's attempts to counter these attacks and shift the focus of conversation were largely thwarted, as questionable comments from Republican Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock brought the issue of abortion to the forefront. Both of these statements added fuel to the narrative that Republicans are out of touch with women's needs. And Romney himself contributed to the problem, as his notorious “binders full of women” debate response broadened the scope of the issue from reproductive rights to more general issues about gender equality. Altogether, these Republican comments and positions opened the door for Democrats on the campaign trail to attack the party, and a popular conclusion is that this “War on Women” narrative hurt the Republican Party and played an integral part in Obama's victory.

Campaigns in control: Analyzing controlled interactivity and message discipline on Facebook

ABSTRACTMost American political campaigns use social media as one component of a broader communication strategy. Campaign use of social media is typically governed by controlled interactivity, a philosophy that attempts to leverage citizens’ online behavior toward the goal of electing the candidate. One key outcome of controlled interactivity is high levels of message discipline, the degree of correspondence between a campaign’s and its audience’s political speech. This study quantifies message discipline as it flows through two highly visible controlled-interactive spaces—Barack Obama’s and Mitt Romney’s respective official campaign Facebook pages—during the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign. The results of a lexicon analysis indicate that Romney’s campaign controlled its audience’s interactivity more effectively than the Obama campaign and that both audiences departed from message discipline most sharply on the issues of civil rights and religion.

Social pressure and voting: A field experiment conducted in a high-salience election

A large-scale experiment assessed the turnout effects of the “Neighbors” mailer, which exerts social pressure to vote by disclosing the past turnout records of recipients and their neighbors. A prior large-scale experiment conducted in a low salience election found that this mailer increased turnout substantially. The experiment reported here gauges the effects of this mailer in the context of a hotly contested recall election. We find smaller but still sizable effects, especially for low-propensity voters. Turnout increases significantly in the presidential election several months later, and the immediate and downstream effects are similar regardless of whether the mailer is worded in partisan or nonpartisan terms. Using data furnished by the Obama campaign and several nonpartisan organizations, we find little evidence that receiving the Neighbors mailer caused people to become the targets of subsequent mobilizing activity, suggesting that the downstream effects of social pressure cannot be attributed to subsequent campaign contacts.

Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy by Daniel Kreiss

Reviewed by: Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracyby Daniel Kreiss Eitan D. Hersh (bio) Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy. by Daniel Kreiss. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. 306. $99/ $27.95. For a political party or campaign, figuring out what makes 200 million voters tick has always been a monumental task. The task is made easier—or maybe just made different—by the dramatic advances in technology in the last fifteen years. As Daniel Kreiss tells us in his new book, Prototype Politics, campaigns leverage technology "to define what twenty-first-century citizenship looks like." In this masterfully written work, a mix of history, sociology, journalism, and political science, Professor Kreiss walks the reader through how Democratic and Republican campaigns from 2000 to 2014 leveraged technology to connect with voters. The narrative is told, in large part, through the lens of some fifty-five key players interviewed by the author. The story of the Obama years is one of uneven embrace of technology on the Democratic and Republican sides. Both parties, of course, are confronted with the same shifting media landscape. But in Kreiss's account, the Democrats were much more invested in technology than the Republicans. They hired more staff and built an extended network of organizations and companies that together worked on developing campaign tools. Meanwhile, the Republican Party, in part hampered by changing leadership at the Republican National Committee, did not embrace a tech-centered perspective between 2000 and 2012. Kreiss not only charts this difference between the two parties with a compelling writing style reminiscent of an investigative journalist, he offers an explanation of why it happened, building on a vast and diverse scholarly literature, which he takes in new directions. Key to his explanation is the narrative that parties themselves create about why they win or lose. The 2004 election was a defining moment for Democrats. Not only did John Kerry lose narrowly in the general election, but the Democratic primary featured Howard Dean, whose pioneering embrace of technology was a major story. After Kerry's loss, the Democrats' narrative was that they could have won if they had run a campaign built around technology. Accordingly, between 2004 and 2008, the Democrats made big investments in technology. Having built the infrastructure, they determined in 2008 that these investments paid off. From the Democrats' view, the Obama campaign became a prototypefor how to win campaigns. The Republicans did not create a parallel narrative around technology in 2004, when they won, or in 2008, when it was easy for them to attribute their loss to a bad economy or a demand for change after eight years of President Bush. No amount of technology would have saved the Republicans [End Page 608]from their landslide loss in 2008. So they did not focus on building technological infrastructure. However, in 2012, after a narrower Republican loss, the party started to tell a story about how technology could get them an extra percentage point or two in a close election. Kreiss's argument is important in explaining that there is not a steady march of technology and adoption by political actors. Rather, political actors tell themselves a story that they could win if they adopted this or that approach. Prototype Politicscontributes to our understanding of organizations and how they develop. It builds on research about the role of a political party and its relationship to candidates and voters. It offers a new explanation to a long-held question in political science about the nature of incumbency. Embracing technology requires constant attention and investment. This makes it hard for new entrants to compete against incumbent regimes. Prototype Politicswent to press before Donald Trump won the 2016 Republican primary. Nevertheless, the book holds lessons for the future of campaigning. For one, the Republican Party did have a technology wake-up call after the 2012 election and began investing in data-centric campaigning. Future research will tell us how much of that investment found its way into the Trump campaign. But the other big lesson is that Donald Trump's 2016 campaign might become a prototype for future candidates...

Governmental Entrepreneurial Leadership Accelerator Year-End Report

All governments today - at the federal, state, and local level - feel the pressure to accomplish more with fewer resources because citizens expect it and are watching to ensure that their taxpayer funds are spent wisely. One answer to the two-prong challenge of spurring more innovation and doing more-for-less is to encourage entrepreneurial leadership and problem solving in government. To that end, this report describes a first-of-its-kind accelerator that teaches governmental employees and law students entrepreneurial problem-solving skillsets and how to apply them to real-world government problems. The program, called the Governmental Entrepreneurial Leadership Accelerator (GELA), explores a new model of governmental problem solving and leadership development. GELA, a partnership between the City and County of Denver and the Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado Boulder, aims to accelerate governmental entrepreneurial leadership. We believe it is the first program of its kind. There are other accelerators for technology entrepreneurship (Techstars), for social entrepreneurship (Unreasonable Institute), and for startup companies with at least one woman on the leadership team (MergeLane). There are also programs that target innovation in how government uses technology (Code for America). To our knowledge, GELA is the only program that combines the startup accelerator approach of a Techstars or MergeLane, which develops entrepreneurial leadership and problem-solving skills, and the problems faced by governments. Governmental decision making and problem solving often rely on institutional inertia and a top-down managerial approach, making the entire organization less responsive to constituent demands and less innovative. By contrast, startup businesses and entrepreneurs generally embrace innovative solutions that leverage unique insights into action, regardless of where those insights come from. In short, governments tend to operate as a hierarchy; entrepreneurs and startups tend to operate as a network. The network/hierarchy distinction is a very important one. For starters, it captures the notion that the best idea does not always come from the top, and anyone in the network can challenge status quo thinking as long as they back it up with data, strong reasoning, and a plan for implementation. It also captures what is now called “Joy’s Law,” named after Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, and recognizes that “no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” In practice, this means that the best networks do not end within an organization but extend outside of it, allowing others to help solve important problems. One element of training entrepreneurial leaders in government is to develop this network mindset. A second key aspect of entrepreneurial problem solving involves a willingness to experiment. For governmental entities, there is a real barrier to this mindset because of the risk of negative publicity if and when an experiment fails. This status quo bias mirrors the old adage “no one ever got fired for buying IBM.” The challenge for governmental leaders is to empower people at all levels to challenge assumptions, innovate, or advocate for change as well as to design experiments to evaluate appropriate changes. In the entrepreneurial world, problem-solving techniques such as “lean startup” and design-centered thinking provide a framework for developing and testing experimental ideas. For governments, the question of how to think more entrepreneurially when solving problems and build more innovative solutions to pressing policy issues is only starting to be asked by elected officials and agency leaders. For many, the term “entrepreneurial thinking” or “entrepreneurial problem solving” connotes startup companies or at least private sector efforts. In practice, however, the substantive methodology, as well as the mindset, can readily be used in government. The challenge is how to apply an entrepreneurial mindset and skillset to the public sector. An irony related to governmental resistance to entrepreneurial leadership in is that it can be readily seen in political campaigns, which are themselves a start-up. In political campaigns, entrepreneurial methods and mindsets - notably, a bias towards experimenting with data-driven strategies - are often the norm. Consider, for example, how the 2008 Obama campaign used A/B testing (quick testing of small changes in a website) to increase fundraising numbers in emails. Yet it was the Obama Administration that used the traditional procurement playbook - to terrible ends - when rolling out Healthcare.gov. The challenge, in short, is for governments to embrace the techniques now used to innovate in startup companies, established companies, social enterprises, and political campaigns. This report explains how GELA developed a model to facilitate this very transition. This report proceeds in five parts. After this Introduction, Part II describes the nuts and bolts of GELA, how it was implemented, and how the program fared. Part III evaluates how GELA can be improved in its next iteration. Part IV explains how other governments can replicate GELA with a civic innovation accelerator model. Part V offers a short conclusion.

Comparing online campaigning: The evolution of interactive campaigning from Royal to Obama to Hollande

Studies of election campaigning from a comparative perspective have a long history; this study approaches the topic through a most-similar regime perspective to explore the ebb and flow of innovations in digital campaigning between presidential campaigns in France and the United States. The hype surrounding the 2008 Obama campaign overshadowed innovations in France the previous year, while the 2011 contest gained little serious academic attention. Using a well-established content analysis methodology the research explains the strategic design of the digital dimension of the campaigns of the leading candidates (Sarkozy and Royal in 2007, Obama and McCain in 2008, Hollande and Sarkozy in 2011, and Obama and Romney in 2012). The research then assesses the strategic contribution of each feature using schematics for understanding the flow of communication, as well as the strategy employed by each candidate. The key findings are that the campaigns are becoming more interactive, with the citizens increasingly more able to enter into conversations with the campaign teams, however interactivity when it happens is carefully controlled. Largely, however, there is a strong similarity masked by the sophistication of US contests. Despite the advances in communication technology and the social trends they have instigated, campaign communication remains top-down and digital technologies are used to gather data and push supporters towards activism than creating an inclusive space for the co-creation that cyberoptimists argued would revitalise the structures of democracy.

The Potential of Big Data for the Cross-National Study of Political Behavior

The U.S. presidential elections of 2008 and 2012 were a coming out party for Big Data applications in electoral studies. The Obama campaign developed a model of identifying individual voters that guided their campaign strategy to a successful outcome. This essay considers whether this model is exportable to elections and other aspects of political behavior in cross-national research. There is uneven development to date, but a growing awareness of the potential of Big Data electoral campaigns. More broadly, the essay discusses the current potential and limits of Big Data for the cross-national study of political behavior. The potential exceeds the actual applications, and there are major challenges for academic, theory-testing research using Big Data methods. It is unclear whether Big Data can successfully address these challenges.

Re-Imagining the Nation: Storytelling and Social Media in the Obama Campaigns

Re-Imagining the Nation: Storytelling and Social Media in the Obama Campaigns

One-Sided Discussions: Deliberation in Weblogs during the 2009 National Election

Against the backdrop of the 2008 Obama campaign, participatory online tools were one main component of parties' campaigning strategy in Germany 2009. They used a wide variety of online tools to communicate directly with the voters. While political actors reiterated to accentuate the discursive potential of such tools, sceptics questioned whether such instrumental campaign communication can facilitate sound political discussions. The article analyses whether or not the internet fostered citizen participation during the 2009 national election campaign for the German Bundestag. A content analysis of the posts and comments in the weblogs of the major parties, CDU and SPD, was conducted. Results reveal that participation took place only on a very low level. Furthermore, the few comments published (370 in four weeks) failed to meet basic requirements of deliberation such as objectivity or argumentativity. Moreover, both parties actively prevented a free discourse as single comments may not have been authorised.