Recent Presidential Campaign Research Articles

Does Complex or Simple Rhetoric Win Elections? An Integrative Complexity Analysis of U.S. Presidential Campaigns

Research suggests that the integrative complexity of political rhetoric tends to drop during election season, but little research to date directly addresses if this drop in complexity serves to increase or decrease electoral success. The two present studies help fill this gap. Study 1 demonstrates that, during the Democratic Party primary debates in 2003–2004, the eventual winners of the party nomination showed a steeper drop in integrative complexity as the election season progressed than nonwinning candidates. Study 2 presents laboratory evidence from the most recent presidential campaign demonstrating that, while the complexity of Obama's rhetoric had little impact on college students' subsequent intentions to vote for him, the complexity of McCain's rhetoric was significantly positively correlated with their likelihood of voting for him. Taken together, this research is inconsistent with an unqualified simple is effective view of the complexity‐success relationship. Rather, it is more consistent with a compensatory view: Effective use of complexity (or simplicity) may compensate for perceived weaknesses. Thus, appropriately timed shifts in complexity levels, and/or violations of negative expectations relevant to complexity, may be an effective means of winning elections. Surprisingly, mere simplicity as such seems largely ineffective.

Changing Strategies in Grassroots Canvassing: 1956-2008

Grass-roots party contacts with voters have become an important feature of recent presidential campaigns. Using respondent reports of party contacts from the 1956-2008 time series of American National Election Studies survey, this paper describes the increase in contacting of the elections of the 2000s and explains it as a function of changes in party capabilities and strategies. In a bygone era, grassroots contacting efforts were the work of the local party organizations – the product of their various capabilities and needs and, consequently, less patterned across the country. With the demise of the local organizations, these grassroots efforts declined; by 1992, contacting had fallen to its lowest point (reaching only 18% of the electorate) in almost four decades. In recent elections, though, the national parties and presidential campaigns have filled this void through their personal contacts with voters that now reach over 40% of the electorate. The ANES evidence shows that this surge in party grassroots contacting is tied to the strategic priorities of the national parties and presidential campaigns. They concentrate their efforts in the most competitive, battleground, states; on the most likely voters as defined by age, income, campaign activities, and registration status; and, especially in 2008, on mobilizing their partisan base. In ramping up party contacted, who is contacted has changed – and become more readily predictable – and the American electoral process has been transformed.

Choosing to Hope in Challenging Times

Over the past several months, messages of "hope" from the most recent presidential campaign have been followed by documentation of widespread financial insecurity. The rocky economic climate continues to impact adversely higher education institutions, communities, families, and individuals. This fall, more students with financial or educational uncertainties may be seeking assistance at student affairs offices with smaller staffs, fewer resources, or both. While offering no concrete solutions to these problems, the three major ethics and professional standards statements are abiding sources of support and guidance as student affairs professionals begin what may be a very difficult year.

Taking Late Night Comedy Seriously

Candidate appearances on entertainment television have become a staple of recent presidential campaigns, yet little is known about their effect on voters. Many assume that they leave viewers uninformed and focused on the candidate’s personal image. In this article, the author investigates this idea with an experiment using John Kerry’s 2004 appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman. He finds that—contrary to popular expectations—late night interviews have particular features that can, at times, engage otherwise politically disinterested viewers, causing them to process and recall substantive policy information.

Strategic Essentialism in Nationalist Discourses: Sketching a Feminist Agenda in the Study of Religion

In the United States, celebrations such as Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Columbus Day, or Veteran’s Day, to name a few, rhetorically function to shore up Christian kyriarchal, militarist, and heterosexist nationalism. In an essay on nationalism and globalization, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza states that “patriotic nationalism is the most powerful discourse of the day. . . . The rhetoric of the most recent presidential campaign [2004] has driven home the degree to which religion is implicated in such nationalist discourse.”1 The call to think of nationalism as the frame for critical studies in feminism and religion necessitates the move to study religion in the cultural-political context of nationalist rhetoric. Consequently, feminist proposals in religion will need to closely examine the cultural contexts and the rhetorical function of gender in nationalist agendas. One way to frame this analysis is to examine the issue of gender essentialism. On the one hand, the problem of essentialism has been identified as the locus of various hegemonic and ideological controls of women; on the other hand, some feminists writing in the study of theology and religion strategically retrieve modes of essentialism to combat the ideological representations of masculine superiority. An examination of the way in which the term is used in contemporary feminist theory shows that reliance on essentialism, whether strategic or otherwise, extracts a cost that remains politically perturbing. In making this assertion, I refer specifically to Schussler Fiorenza’s move to the rhetorical; what is the effect of deploying strategic essentialist positions on cultural, social, or biological femininity on the intersecting axes of oppression on wo/men such as race, class, gender, and sexuality? An example of the way in which strategic essentialism can be mobilized for theology has been presented by Nancy Dallavalle in her essay “Neither Idolatry nor Iconoclasm: A Critical Essentialism for Catholic Feminist Theology.”2 Dallavalle claims that feminist rejection of gender essentialism creates an “agnosticism” of gendered identity. According to Dallavalle, reliance on biological sexuality requires the strategic, or, to use her term, the critical use of essentialism to imagine in a more capacious way, the possibility of gender as a theological resource within the Catholic tradition. In this view, gendered identity has sacramental potential and women have a theologically legitimate way to speak of themselves as infused with the divine. Critical essentialism here functions to

Letter from the Executive Director.

Personalized MedicineVol. 6, No. 1 News & ViewsFree AccessLetter from the Executive DirectorEdward AbrahamsEdward AbrahamsPersonalized Medicine Coalition, 1225 New York Avenue, NW, Suite 400, Washington, DC 20005 USA. Search for more papers by this authorEmail the corresponding author at eabrahams@personalizedmedicinecoalition.orgPublished Online:23 Dec 2008https://doi.org/10.2217/17410541.6.1.11AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInReddit The election of Barack Obama as President of the USA presents an unprecedented, perhaps not-to-be-repeated opportunity to advance the agenda for personalized medicine, change the way medicine is practiced and improve healthcare.President-elect Obama wrote the first bill in Congress that identified the promise of personalized medicine. Among other things, his bill created incentives to encourage the co-development of diagnostic and therapeutic products, called for funding to train a new workforce in genetics and genomics, established a biobanking database and authorized an interagency workgroup to coordinate the government’s policies so that they promote the new paradigm.As president, his horizon is much broader, but his interest in personalized medicine is likely to increase. He faces the central conundrum of healthcare: extend coverage to the 15% of the American public who do not have health insurance, spur the future research and development upon which patients depend and, at the same time, cut systemic, exploding costs that reduce productivity in the economy.Unless President-elect Obama can simultaneously achieve these three competing goals, his healthcare plan is likely to face serious opposition. Americans, historically a “people of plenty”, as the sociologist David Potter wrote 50 years ago, are nearly certain to reject any plan to which the label ‘rationing’ can be applied. Indeed, a plan that does not promise improved overall quality of care, offer an expectation that new discoveries will lead to better medicine tomorrow and lower systemic costs is unlikely to garner sufficient public support to be enacted.The only way to square the circle of increasing the quality and supply of healthcare while simultaneously cutting costs is to deploy new technologies and new approaches that introduce efficiencies in the system, while also emphasizing prevention, which will keep people healthier and also reduce the costs of chronic care. This is why during the recent presidential campaign, building on Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt’s generally unfunded initiative, President-elect Obama (and presidential candidate Senator John McCain) supported investing in health information technologies. Since the election, President-elect Obama has floated the idea of including US$10 billion in a stimulus package for health information technologies that could help build an infrastructure for more rational decision-making in medicine.One reason I believe that President-elect Obama did not focus on personalized medicine during the campaign, with the exception of a reference to it in his “plan to combat cancer”, was because the relatively new concept requires a review of complex biomedical issues that do not lend themselves to the exigencies of modern politics. In addition, although the Personalized Medicine Coalition estimates that there are almost 40 personalized medicine products on the market today, we have not yet reached a tipping point when physicians, payers, and particularly patients demand a diagnostic test before therapy is prescribed.This is why the Personalized Medicine Coalition contends that our proposed agenda of increasing investment in translational research, creating a friendlier regulatory environment that facilitates the co-development of diagnostic and therapeutic products, and putting in place a reimbursement system that supports personalized medicine products is all the more compelling.We know, moreover, that without more examples of widely used drug–diagnostic products, risk-adverse skeptics will not support reconstructing health systems around the world along these lines. We therefore also propose that clinical trails designed to determine if personalized approaches to care can produce both better patient outcomes and reduced costs be conducted sooner rather later.In brief, the principles of personalized medicine, including getting the treatment right the first time and preventing illness when possible, are the only way Obama’s health plan can achieve everything the American public wants.Edward Abrahams, Executive Director,Personalized Medicine CoalitionFiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Vol. 6, No. 1 Follow us on social media for the latest updates Metrics History Published online 23 December 2008 Published in print January 2009 Information© Future Medicine LtdPDF download

Zawód – żona polityka. Rola kobiet w kreowaniu wizerunku politycznego

The most recent presidential election at the time of writing, the term of Aleksander Kwaoeniewski, everyday political life and the recent presidential campaign have demonstrated how important the role of a politician’s wife has become. That a wife may act as the president of a foundation, as an advisor, as a chair of an association, as an activist defending the rights of children and any related activity, is one of the elements of the image of the husband – a politician. When asked whether their decision to get married would have been different if they had known many years ago that their husband would become involved in politics, the answer is „No”.Women are satisfied living with a politician, although they generally admit that this requires sacrifice. When something important is happening, everything else has to be neglected. Then they have to be patient, persistent and wise, because only such an attitude can advantageously influence the political images of their husbands.

The Problematic Role of Responsibility in Contexts of Distributive Justice

It would be surprising if our idea of ourselves as responsible agents did not have a significant place in our understanding of one another as members of a political community with common claims and obligations. We see this idea at work, for example, in disputes about the extent to which the poor are or are not responsible for their lot or smokers for their ill-health. Its most common use, it seems, is to explain and justify differences in shares of economic and other social goods. We see this use implicitly in the following letter to the Editor during the recent Presidential campaign. The author of the letter declares:

Managing Voter Impressions: The Use of Images on Presidential Candidate Web Sites During the 2000 Campaign

Presidents Kennedy, Reagan, and Clinton mastered of art of using television to manage impressions in the television age. With the advent of the Internet, recent presidential campaigns have begun to recognize the potential of this medium in shaping images and managing impressions among voters. This study focuses on the 2000 presidential election and the images of the presidential candidates appearing on their official campaign Web sites. It also evaluates the visual strategies the candidates used and the overall themes of the images. Each candidate appeared to present campaign photographs in ways that may have been orchestrated to enhance their appeal and reverse negative media portrayals.

The Language of the Presidential Election Campaign in Ukraine

The objective of the article is to trace and analyze Ukrainian language use in the recent presidential election campaign, paying particular attention to lexical innovations, neologisms, and satirical allusions. These changes are presented as the continuation of a steady process of democratization or liberalization of the Ukrainian language, a phenomenon some researchers previously attributed only to Russian. The language practices of the "Kuchma-Yanukovych regime" is presented and analyzed. The view of Yushchenko by his supporters as the narodnyi kandydat/prezydent (the people’s candidate/President) finds its antipode in political neologisms coined by Yanukovych’s camp (e.g., nashysty/nashysts’kyi), which were designed to attribute fascist tendencies to Yushchenko’s bloc, Nasha Ukraina ’Our Ukraine’. The egg farce during the campaign showed the vulnerability of Yanukovych’s camp to satire.

A Note on Interests, Values, and the Use of Force

The recent presidential election campaign intensified a public debate that began in earnest in November 1984 when Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger delivered his famous National Press Club speech on use of force. That debate has evolved over years. It began as a discussion of whether force should be withheld only for real war or also used for coercive diplomacy. Though this issue persists, debate has come to focus primarily on whether force should be reserved for defense of interests as opposed to promotion of values. At one end of spectrum are strict constructionist Weinberger doctrinaires, many of them military professionals, who believe that force should not be used either for diplomacy or value promotion--that it should be employed only to protect United States and its allies from direct military threats. At other end are those who believe that force is an indispensable tool of diplomacy and a legitimate if highly circumstantial means of promoting democracy, halting ge nocide, and restoring order in conditions of anarchy. The Bush campaign argued strongly for interests, whereas Gore campaign spoke up for values as well as Indeed, Bush spokesmen condemned Clinton Administration for dissipating US military strength across a series of military interventions and peace-enforcement obligations on behalf of value promotion. The Gore camp defended US intervention in Balkans and Haiti on grounds that stopping ethnic cleansing and restoring democracy served America's strategic interests precisely by promoting American values overseas. The argument over interests versus values as bases for military action is hardly new. President Theodore Roosevelt and his foreign policy epitomized approach to world based on concrete national interest. Roosevelt accepted world for what it was in early 1900s: a Hobbesian struggle for power and influence in which it was foolish to believe in any morality other than that of raison d'etat. The best way to operate in such a world was through maintenance of a balance of power among major states, and war was sometimes necessary to maintain that balance. In contrast was President Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy based on active promotion of American values overseas. For Wilson, peace was natural state of affairs, broken only by tyrannical states bent on conquest. The key to making world safe for democracy was to democratize world itself, because democracies were morally superior to other states and would not make war upon one another. Entry into World War I afforded United States opportunity to join Europe's democracies in ridding continent of German authoritarianism and aggression. Both realist and idealist approaches have influenced US foreign policy since presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Richard Nixon was a self-declared practitioner of realpolitik who acted mainly on basis on interest, not values. His embrace of communist China in a de facto strategic partnership was purely and simply a move to bolster containment of expanding Soviet power and influence in wake of US defeat in Vietnam. Jimmy Carter was Wilson-oriented in his approach to foreign policy, as was Bill Clinton. Carter placed human rights ahead of balancing Soviet power, at least until Russians invaded Afghanistan, and Clinton used force repeatedly to push values in places--Somalia, Haiti, and former Yugoslavia--peripheral to traditional US security Or so it seemed. Most presidents, however, cannot be easily pigeonholed as either or because in their use-of-force decisions they were motivated by considerations of both power and values. Certainly, it is historically preposterous to argue that the liberal fights for values in contrast to conservative who fights for interests. [1] No American better understood threat Nazi aggression in Europe posed to American strategic interests than liberal Franklin Roosevelt, and it was conservative George Bush who went to war in Persian Gulf to vindicate his ideal of a new world order. …

Russian Elections and TV News

Recent parliamentary and presidential election campaigns in the Russian Federation offer a chance to study the political role of television in a post-Soviet state. Television has many roles to play during an election in a developing democracy: It should inform voters about choices, report on the events of the campaign, and educate voters about the electoral process itself. This article examines how the news coverage of parliamentary and presidential elections on Russia's primary state television channel and on its largest private television station fulfilled these goals. The results of coding television news during the campaign periods for the 1995 Duma campaign and the 1996 presidential race show that these channels generally failed to contribute fully to the legitimization of the electoral process. During the parliamentary campaign, state-controlled Russian Public Television (ORT) focused on pro-government parties and neglected coverage of the competition. Although the elections coverage on the private NTV station was more balanced, the elections were relatively ignored in favor of aggressive coverage of the war in Chechnya. By the 1996 presidential election, the two stations both abandoned the pretense of neutrality to promote the incumbent presidential candidate, Boris Yeltsin. What emerges from this study is evidence of a missed opportunity to consolidate the growth of an independent media in Russia—and the failure of voters to obtain disinterested information from primary television outlets in a fragile democracy.

From a government of the people, to a people of the government: Irony as rhetorical strategy in presidential campaigns

This essay considers irony as rhetorical strategy in recent presidential campaigns and argues that it promotes identification on the basis of public cynicism toward government, through which people transcend problems of government. The irony in campaign rhetoric is viewed as a response by candidates to the increasing levels of cynicism toward government over the past thirty years. Since the irony used by candidates is cynical as well, candidates exploit the very problem they articulate for themselves and the nation they wish to lead. While this strain of ironic discourse helps challengers overcome incumbents, it also generates public cynicism toward government.

Reading the Tort Litigation Tea Leaves: What’s Going on in the Civil Liability System?

The recent presidential campaign controversy about the state of the civil justice system provides an incentive for revisiting the question of how to properly characterize the tort litigation system. How many tort cases are there? What is the aggregate rate of growth in tort filings? How different or alike are filing patterns, trial outcomes, and costs for different types of torts? A review of the available data suggests that the liability system is continuing to grow, but that the patterns of growth are far more complex and more difficult to explain than was suggested in the recent presidential campaign. New data support the idea that the tort liability system comprises multiple “worlds” of litigation, but raise questions about what is actually going on in each of these worlds. Current data are inadequate for answering these questions. Without a program of sustained research on litigation behavior and outcomes, we will be forced to rely on “reading the tea leaves” to assess trends in the civil justice system.

Reexamining the "Minimal Effects" Model in Recent Presidential Campaigns

Although much recent work suggests that contemporary presidential campaigns have more powerful electoral effects than were seen in previous decades, there has been little research that examines the actual effect of recent campaigns on individual vote choice. Using the 1980 NES panel study, I show that the overwhelming majority of individual votes can be accounted for from attitudes such as party identification and presidential approval that are measured before the political conventions, and that changes in orientations during the campaign had limited effects on individual vote choice and negligible consequences for the electoral outcome. Moreover, models derived from the 1980 panel data can predict with a great deal of accuracy the aggregate outcomes of the 1984 and 1988 presidential contests. I argue that the results support an "activation" model of campaign effects in recent elections: rather than simply reinforcing individuals' preexisting vote intentions, the campaigns served mainly to activate existing political predispositions and make them electorally relevant. At the same time, the results show that campaigns have the potential to exert larger electoral effects, but in recent elections they have not done so.

Political campaign pinpoints 'stigma hurdle' facing nation's mental health community

THE CAMPAIGN to overcome cultural stigma attached to depression (<i>JAMA</i>1988;260:309-310) has received a boost from another campaign, the one for President of the United States. Candidate Michael S. Dukakis has been obliged to respond to allegations that he received professional treatment for depression. Although this was not the case; much of the reaction among the news media and elsewhere has been: What's wrong with being treated for a usually curable problem experienced by millions of persons? In recent presidential campaigns, perhaps in reaction to postmortem disclosures of serious illnesses of some past Presidents, the willingness or reluctance of a candidate to reveal medical history has in itself become a public issue. Candidates are now under pressure to disclose the minutiae of their personal health, from hemorrhoids to allergies. Personal physicians are being instructed to respond in detail to news media questions about their prominent patient's ailments and therapies. Greater

Political Campaign Pinpoints `Stigma Hurdle' Facing Nation's Mental Health Community

THE CAMPAIGN to overcome cultural stigma attached to depression (JAMA1988;260:309-310) has received a boost from another campaign, the one for President of the United States. Candidate Michael S. Dukakis has been obliged to respond to allegations that he received professional treatment for depression. Although this was not the case; much of the reaction among the news media and elsewhere has been: What's wrong with being treated for a usually curable problem experienced by millions of persons? In recent presidential campaigns, perhaps in reaction to postmortem disclosures of serious illnesses of some past Presidents, the willingness or reluctance of a candidate to reveal medical history has in itself become a public issue. Candidates are now under pressure to disclose the minutiae of their personal health, from hemorrhoids to allergies. Personal physicians are being instructed to respond in detail to news media questions about their prominent patient's ailments and therapies. Greater

The Structure and Stability of Political Attitudes: Findings From the 1974-76 Dearborn Panel Study

The Structure and Stability of Political Attitudes: Findings From the 1974-76 Dearborn Panel Study

Editorials and Foreign Affairs in Recent Presidential Campaigns

Editorials and Foreign Affairs in Recent Presidential Campaigns

The Civil Rights Issue and Presidential Voting Among Southern Negroes and Whites

role the rights issue in the 1960 presidential election was investigated through a survey the voting intentions 130 Negroes and 147 whites in a southern city. rights issue proved to be central importance in the decisions the Negro voters. white on the other hand, tended to make their decisions on other grounds, and the rights issue played a much lesser role. This was due not to indifference toward the issue but rather to the belief that the stands Nixon and Kennedy were equally unacceptable. Thus Kennedy was able to attract a majority Negro voters by adopting a somewhat more militant stance than his opponent on rights without alienating a large number southern whites, who tended to regard any differences between the candidates on rights as insignificant. O S NE OF THE major issues recent presidential election campaigns in the United States has been the question rights for Negroes. Yet, in spite the great importance attached to the issue by the candidates in the conduct their campaigns, the impact the issue upon the voting decisions the public has not generally been studied except in indirect fashion, primarily through the analysis gross voting returns. Thus we have little knowledge the specific effects the rights issue as distinct from other issues with regard to the voting patterns either Negroes or whites. There have been many studies Negro presidential voting based primarily upon the analysis voting returns in predominantly Negro wards and precincts in southern and northern cities.' These studies show that until 1936 Negroes in the United States tended to vote Republican as a kind perpetual monument to Reconstruction. New Deal economic and welfare measures, however, tended to attract Negroes to the Democratic party in the elections between 1936 and 1952. In 1956 there were widespread defections back to the Republican Party. According to Lubell's study 86 cities, Eisenhower received only 25 percent the Negro vote in these cities in 1952 but received 36 percent in 1956.2 change was especially great in the southern cities, where the percent voting for Eisenhower rose from 19 percent in 1952 to 47 percent in 1956. A Gallup poll in January 1957, showed that of all the major groups the nation's population, the one that shifted most to the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket... was the Negro voter.3 reason for the shift the Negro vote in 1956 has been the subject much speculation. Moon believes that civil rights was most certainly an important consideration in the minds Negro voters, and he points out that their switch was most pronounced in the South, where the issue was sharp and inescapable.4 Lubell states that ... . the crucial struggle in the minds Negroes during the last campaign was the conflict between their anger over incidents racial violence in the South and the economic attachment that they felt to the Democratic party.'5 Where unemployment was heavy and where Negroes were relatively well integrated into the labor movement, as in Michigan and Toledo, there were few defections from the * Paper read at the twenty-fourth annual meeting the Southern Sociological Society, Miami Beach, Florida, April 1961. I am indebted to the Research Council Florida State University for financial support this study and to Charles U. Smith Florida A. & M. University for his co-operation and assistance during the field survey phase the study. 1 See Elston Roady, The Negro's Role in Southern Politics, Negro in American Society (Tallahassee: Florida State University Studies, no. 28, 1958); Hugh D. Price, Negro and Southern Politics (New York: New York University Press, 1957); Margaret Price, Negro Voter in the South (Atlanta: Southern Regional Council, 1957); and the numerous articles in the Journal Negro Education, 26 (Summer 1957). 2 Samuel Lubell, The Future the Negro Voter in the United States, Journal Negro Education, 26 (Summer 1957), pp. 408-417. 3 Henry Lee Moon, The Negro Vote in the Presidential Election 1956, Journal Negro Education, 26 (Summer 1957), pp. 219-230. 4 Ibid. p. 226. 5 Lubell, op. cit., p. 408. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.208 on Fri, 14 Oct 2016 04:22:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms