Primary Debates Research Articles

What Were the Tweets About? Topical Associations between Public Events and Twitter Feeds

Social media channels such as Twitter have emerged as platforms for crowds to respond to public and televised events such as speeches and debates. However, the very large volume of responses presents challenges for attempts to extract sense from them. In this work, we present an analytical method based on joint statistical modeling of topical influences from the events and associated Twitter feeds. The model enables the auto-segmentation of the events and the characterization of tweets into two categories: (1) episodic tweets that respond specifically to the content in the segmentsof the events, and (2) steady tweets that respond generally about the events. By applying our method to two large sets of tweets in response to President Obama's speech on the Middle East in May 2011 and a Republican Primary debate in September 2011, we present what these tweets were about. We also reveal the nature and magnitude of the influences of the event on the tweets over its timeline. In a user study, we further show that users find the topics and the episodic tweets discovered by our method to be of higher quality and more interesting as compared to the state-of-the-art, with improvements in the range of 18-41%.

The 2020 democratic presidential primary debates: exploring politeness strategies for facing an aggressive incumbent

This study applied politeness theory to the thirteen Democratic primary debates of the 2020 campaign with comparisons to previous findings regarding the 2012 and 2016 Republican primary debates, the 2016 Democratic primary debates, and general election debates from 1960-2016. Our results indicate that the 2020 Democrats were less aggressive in their attacks than Republicans in 2012 and 2016, and that primary debates from 2012-2020 featured less aggressive qualities, on average, than general election debates. Results of the 2020 Democratic primary debates in particular showed a three-phase process of initial low intensity disagreement among candidates, followed by a phase of directly attacking the incumbent, with a third phase focusing on the Democratic front runners with Moderate and Progressive candidates using more direct and indirect face threats than single-issue and fringe candidates. Finally, while polls predicted the amount of time and thought-units candidates were afforded in the debates, they had little influence on politeness strategies utilized by the candidates.

U.S. presidential debates 1948–2020: an issue of formality and respect

This article investigates the level of formality in presidential debates. Using content analytic techniques, this study documents trends in address terms (ranging from the use of honorific titles to interpersonal insults) in presidential debates from 1948 to 2020. An availability sample of 241 debates (94% of all presidential primary and general election debates), including 21,857 coding units, reveal an overall decline in formal communication via the use of appropriate honorific titles and subsequent growth in informal and disrespectful references. Incivility spiral theory offers an interpretative framework that links the increase in informal patterns of communication to the growing level of incivility in debate discourse. Within this framework, it is speculated that a shift toward informality could be linked to a larger incivility spiral that will continue into the future. Beyond the link to incivility, it is also argued the shift toward informality may have a range of unique negative consequences.

Strategic functions of linguistic impoliteness in US primary election debates

AbstractSince presidential primary debates in US election campaigns serve the function of identifying the most promising nominee for the subsequent presidency, they constitute a highly adversarial multilogue. Debaters do not only exchange factual arguments but also use diverse forms of impoliteness geared towards damaging the public image of political opponents and persuading audiences to vote accordingly. Combining political discourse analysis with pragmatic approaches to impoliteness, this paper examines the ways in which verbal aggression in debates inflicts damage on the addressee’s positive and negative face. On the basis of five Democratic and five Republican debates from 2016, it is shown that impolite utterances fulfil the four central strategic functions of (a) delegitimization, (b) coercion, (c) entertainment, and (d) (self-)defence, all of which support the macro-function of political persuasion through the construction of personal preferability.

“This is a patriotism check”: Political economy, corruption, and duty to America in the 2020 primary debates

The 2020 Democratic presidential primaries involved the largest and most diverse slate of candidates in the modern era of party nominee selection, a diversity that allowed some candidates to reject neoliberal discourses endemic to American politics. In this essay, we analyze the 2020 Democratic primary debates to demonstrate the emergence of an alternative political economy that stands in opposition to standard economic orthodoxy. Candidates organized their critiques of the extant political economy around corruption, presenting it as rot at the heart of the present capitalist order, with Donald Trump more symptom than cause of America’s unjust and deeply flawed economic system. That rot compelled candidates to present an alternative in “economic patriotism” which posited obligation to the collective above and in opposition to neoliberal profit. The essay concludes by unpacking the implications of this break from orthodoxy in the campaign debate context.

Do Presidential Primary Debates Increase Political Polarization?

This study presents the results of a quasi-experiment to assess the effects of viewing a strategically manipulated portion of a 2020 Democratic Primary debate. Our aim was to assess the polarizing potential of primary debates on both ingroup (Democratic) and outgroup (Republican) viewers. Viewing the primary debate resulted in less perceived closeness with members of the opposing political party, greater feelings of social distance, and more attribution of malevolent intentions. These effects were consistent regardless of whether the viewer was a member of the political ingroup (Democrats) or outgroup (Republicans). Conversely, there was no effect of debate viewing on evaluations of outparty candidates (with respect to negative trait attributions or lower feeling thermometer evaluations)., nor did support for political compromise change as a result of viewing the debate. Both Democrats and independents reported improved evaluations of participating candidates, though Republican evaluations did not change.

Rhetorical moves in political discourse: closing statements by presidential candidates in US primary election debates

AbstractPresidential primary debates in the USA are commonly concluded by brief closing statements, in which the competitors outline the central messages of their election campaigns. These statements constitute a subgenre characterized by a set of recurring rhetorical moves, which are defined as functional units geared towards the respective communicative objective, in this case political persuasion. Located at the interface of rhetorical move analysis and political discourse studies, this paper demonstrates that moves and embedded steps in closing statements fulfill the persuasive function of legitimizing the respective candidate as the most preferable presidential successor. The study is based on the transcripts of 98 closing statements, which were extracted from eight Democratic and eleven Republican primary debates held between August 2015 and April 2016. Typical moves, such as projecting the speaker’s future political agenda or diagnosing the current situation in America, are presented with the help of illustrative examples, frequencies of occurrence, and a sample analysis of a complete closing statement.

The Role of Non-State Actors in Climate Law

This chapter engages the key legal debates surrounding the role of non-state actors (NSAs) in climate law. NSAs—a wide category that reflects the expansion of international climate governance beyond the state—include entities as diverse as individuals, companies, international organizations, industry associations, cities, indigenous peoples, and civil-society organizations. Over the past decades, and especially since the adoption of the Paris Agreement, the many roles of NSAs in addressing climate change have attracted significant interest from treaty negotiators, business man-agers, environmental activists, policymakers, and researchers. Seen as performing vital functions ranging from innovation and agenda-setting to implementation, monitoring, and enforcement, NSAs are widely considered as bringing about dynamic forms of climate governance. The potential of direct mitigation effort by NSAs, such as voluntary emission-reduction commitments by companies and cities, is similarly highlighted as a key component in any future solution to climate change. The growing climate action by NSAs forces a rethink of the legal underpinnings of the climate regime and opens new perspectives on the logic of NSA-driven climate governance. This chapter discusses the legal dynamics of non-state climate governance. Using three archetypical NSAs—companies, cities, and civil-society organizations—as proxies, the chapter isolates three primary debates that frame the interactions between NSAs and climate law. These debates focus on the responsibility of NSAs for causing climate change, the legal techniques of NSA governance, and the role of NSAs as agents of legal change and they reflect the rise of polycentric climate governance and illustrate the expansion of climate law beyond its original emphasis on states. However, the discussion also exposes the difficulties that emerge when embedding different NSAs in a single conceptual frame, as well as the limits of NSA-driven governance more broadly.

Primary Debates and the Presidential Nomination Process

Debates have become a centerpiece of the presidential nominating contest. In this essay, I explore the role debates played in the Democrats’ 2020 primaries. While debates can help voters make decisions about candidates, several aspects of the way debates are held may have unintentional impacts on the nominating process. The Democrats struggled with an oversized field of candidates, and their solutions to this challenge probably hurt the chances of several worthy candidates. Meanwhile, news outlets’ use of debates as major events that showcase their journalists and elaborate production values often overshadows the candidates on stage. In preparing for 2024’s primary debates, America’s political parties should nevertheless avoid the trap of trying to fix the debates of 2020, and focus instead on creating debate formats that best serve the interests of candidates and rank-and-file party members.

Rethinking urban environmental and infrastructural governance in the everyday: Perspectives from and of the global South

In the global South, urban infrastructures and environments are marked by significant heterogeneity and the presence of multiple overlapping systems, configurations and actor networks that keep the city working – water flows, electricity is available, and waste is collected. This occurs in the face of what has been traditionally characterized as failed or incomplete infrastructures and the presence of governance practices that often deviate from formalized norms and policies. However, increasingly academics are arguing that such heterogeneity represents not failure but spaces of possibility and transition. This introduction lays out some of the theoretical underpinnings and conceptual ideas that frame urban environmental and infrastructural governance in the everyday. We then outline how the contributions of this Special Issue (SI) reveal the contested, negotiated, and situated nature of everyday urban governance and the multiple ways that politics become spatialized and power shapes contemporary cities, urban environments, and infrastructures. The SI brings together an interdisciplinary and diverse range of contributions focusing on case studies in secondary and metropolitan cities in India, Tanzania, Malawi, Kenya and Guinea-Bissau, and Brazil. Read together, the papers in this issue contribute to four primary debates and discussions in urban studies and social science studies of the urban environment. These include responding to noted absences in studies of urban political ecologies, contributing to new understandings of the urban political, focusing on the practices that produce political subjectivity and render groups governable, and highlighting everyday spaces of possibility for a more equitable urban future.

Visual Priming and Framing During the 2020 Democratic Presidential Debates: Electoral Status Predicts Favorable Camera Treatment

The 2020 Democratic presidential primary debates provide a unique opportunity to systematically evaluate network visual production choices in a multicandidate context. The joint decision of the Democratic National Committee and NBC to include an expansive field of twenty contenders through “prime-time” debates on consecutive nights (June 26 and 27, 2019) provided for a natural experiment with equal numbers of top- and second-tier candidates randomly assigned to each night. In this preregistered study, we evaluate whether candidates are treated differently in the amount of camera time they receive (visual priming) and types of camera shots they appear in (visual framing) based on electoral status. We replicate a study of the initial two Democratic and Republican 2016 presidential primary debates for each party and that found the top-two candidates received substantially better visual coverage than all others. We confirm and extend these findings by evaluating different operationalizations of electoral status (top-two, top-tier, stage position, and poll standing). Findings suggest that when visual priming is considered, stage position outperforms other electoral status indicators in terms of explaining variance for total camera and average fixation time. In terms of visual framing, head-and-shoulder “one-shots” are better predicted by top-tier status, whereas public opinion poll standing predicts increased time spent in multiple-candidate shots. Finally, appearances in “two-shots” (side-by-side and split-screen portrayals) were not significantly explained by electoral status, likely due to the paucity of these depictions.

Gender Self-Presentations in the 2020 U.S. Elections

Ironically, the 2016 election of Donald Trump catalyzed progressive social change in the U.S.. A record number of women and people of color ran for the 2020 presidential nomination of the Democratic party. This election also saw the first openly gay candidate for president. Drawing on qualitative website and Twitter bio data, this article examines the gender self-presentations of twelve Democratic party primary presidential candidates--the eight men and four women who were in the primary debates in October 2019. We develop a new typology of gender self-presentation by classifying different approaches on a spectrum, ranging from gender traditional on one side to feminist on the other (with gender neutral and gender nontraditional in between). We find that most candidates simultaneously blend different types of gender self-presentations in their campaigns. For both men and women in the 2020 election, traditional self-presentations are the least common and gender neutral self-presentations are the most common. For women, nontraditional self-presentations de-emphasize the traditional role of motherhood, use stereotypically masculine language, or emphasize nontraditional gender career experiences. In contrast, for the men, the nontraditional self-presentations were more narrow and stayed solely in the domain of fatherhood. Finally, feminist self-presentations emphasize women’s social and political interests as women, either through the use of pronouns in their Twitter bios or through a discussion of feminist policy issues in websites. While both male and female candidates emphasize feminist issues, the men often do so by drawing on traditionally masculine language or highlight gender stereotypes as male protectors over vulnerable women. Together, these findings suggest that women’s identities as candidates draw on a wider, more multifaceted, range of gender self-presentations. This nuanced typology can be applied to future research on gender and elections.

Shibboleth of Republican Primary Debates

Shibboleth of Republican Primary Debates

Making debating great again: U.S. Presidential candidates’ use of aggressive communication for winning presidential debates

This study explores how presidential candidates leveraged social aggression within the 2015–2016 U.S. presidential primary and general election debates in an effort to characterize their opposition, get ahead of their opponents, and compete for votes. Using a content analysis, this research identifies trends in the use of social, verbal, and nonverbal aggression by presidential candidates over time (both early and late in the election cycle), across political parties (Democratic and Republican primaries) and in different parts of the campaign process (primary elections and general election). Data show that political front-runners were the greatest victims of aggression in the primary debates. Additionally, aggression increased over time within each debate segment analyzed, with the general election debates featuring more aggression than the primary debates.

A Tale of Two Twitterspheres: Political Microblogging During and After the 2016 Primary and Presidential Debates:

In this research, the authors study the process by which social media posts are created and shared during live political debates. Using data from over 9.5 million tweets posted during and shortly a...

Moral Foundations in the 2015-16 U.S. Presidential Primary Debates: The Positive and Negative Moral Vocabulary of Partisan Elites

Moral foundations theory (MFT) suggests that individuals on the political left draw upon moral intuitions relating primarily to care and fairness, whereas conservatives are more motivated than liberals by authority, ingroup, and purity concerns. The theory of conservatism as motivated social cognition (CMSC) suggests that conservatives are more attuned than liberals to threat and to negative stimuli. Because evidence for both accounts rests on studies of mass publics, however, it remains unclear whether political elites of the left and right exhibit these inclinations. Thus, this analysis uses the 2015-16 United States presidential primary season as an occasion to explore partisan differences in candidates’ moral rhetoric. The analysis focuses on verbal responses to questions posed during party primary debates, a setting that is largely unscripted and thus potentially subject to intuitive influences. The Moral Foundations Dictionary is employed to analyze how frequently candidates used words representing various moral foundations, distinguishing between positive and negative references to each. Consistent with CMSC, the Republican candidates were more likely to use negative-valence moral terminology, describing violations of moral foundations. The direction of some partisan differences contradicts the expectations of MFT. Donald Trump, a novice candidate, was an exception to the typical Republican pattern, making markedly lower overall use of moral-foundations vocabulary.

Speaking style and candidate evaluations

ABSTRACT I examine how a politician’s speaking style influences how voters evaluate the candidate. I argue that, above and beyond the content of the message, how a candidate conveys the message has important effects for voter evaluations of the candidate. I focus on two speaking styles: a powerful, straightforward and direct speaking style, and a powerless style, marked by hesitations, hedging and questions. Using original experimental data, I find that candidates who adopt a powerful speaking style in a debate are evaluated more favorably than those with a powerless speaking style. I also find that this effect is somewhat dependent upon the speaker’s gender – women are penalized more than men for adopting a powerless speaking style. Among female participants, the gender gap in evaluations is eliminated for women who adopt a powerful, but not a powerless, speaking style. Among male participants, however, the gender gap exists regardless of speaking style. I additionally find that powerless speaking style makes candidates more likely to be interrupted in the 2016 Presidential primary debates.

Veganwashing Israel’s Dirty Laundry? Animal Politics and Nationalism in Palestine-Israel

ABSTRACTIn popular media and public discourse, Israel has been referred to as ‘the first vegan nation’ and the ‘global centre for veganism’ because of the mainstreaming of veganism in the country in the 2010s. The article examines this triumphalist rhetoric and argues that animal welfare and veganism have been enrolled as a device to narrate the Israeli nation within terms of Jewish Israeli sovereignty. The contemporary cultural politics of veganism in Israel circulate and reinforce national myths of exceptionalism tethered to a Zionist exclusionary ideology, including claims to unique victimhood, pioneering achievements and moral rectitude, which further entrench Jewish Israeli belonging and Palestinian unbelonging. Indeed, Israeli institutions have co-opted an image of ‘vegan/animal-friendliness’ as makers of the nation’s modernity and morality. Yet, drawing on fieldwork with Jewish Israeli activists, the paper argues that both the deliberate practices of veganwashing and its well-intentioned critiques overlook the nuances and ambivalences of Israeli animal politics. The paper also highlights that critiques of veganwashing do not go far enough to show how it is negotiated by Palestinian animal advocates. It suggests that focus on veganwashing as the primary debate of settler-colonial injustice and animal politics has paradoxically rendered them inaudible, and calls instead for a politics of listening.

‘OK, well, first of all, let me say …’: Discursive uses of response initiators in US presidential primary debates

This article examines the discursive uses of frequent response initiators by Republican and Democratic presidential candidates in the genre of televised US primary debates. Ten full transcripts of ...

Visual priming and framing of the 2016 GOP and Democratic Party presidential primary debates.

In an on-demand media environment, the 2016 presidential primary debates provided a ratings and economic boost to host networks surpassing all prior primary debates and even major sporting events in viewership. In turn, millions of viewers were exposed to and subtly influenced by the ways in which these candidates were visually presented. We analyze how the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates were presented in their initial two debates (Fox News and CNN; CNN and CBS, respectively). Candidates are considered in terms of visual priming through aggregate camera time and average camera fixation time and how contenders were visually framed through the proportion of different camera shot types used (solo, split screen, side by side, multiple candidate, and audience reaction). Findings suggest that while the front-runners from both political parties benefited from preferential visual coverage, Donald Trump stood out in terms of the visual priming and framing that presented him as a serious contender.