Candidate Speech Research Articles

Environmental Coding

The purpose of this article is to describe a new coding and data analysis method for qualitative and evaluation researchers. We label this method Environmental Coding, an adaptation of Schmieder-Ramirez and Mallette’s (2007) text, The SPELIT Power Matrix: Untangling the Organizational Environment With the SPELIT Leadership Tool, into the frameworks for qualitative data analysis outlined in Saldaña’s (2016) The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. Environmental Coding employs an eclectic combination of coding approaches in hermeneutic cycles to generate a multidimensional analysis of an environment’s culture and its drivers. This article uses one of Donald Trump’s initial candidate speeches for the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign to illustrate Environmental Coding in action.

The Effects of Auditory Contrast Tuning upon Speech Intelligibility.

We have previously identified neurons tuned to spectral contrast of wideband sounds in auditory cortex of awake marmoset monkeys. Because additive noise alters the spectral contrast of speech, contrast-tuned neurons, if present in human auditory cortex, may aid in extracting speech from noise. Given that this cortical function may be underdeveloped in individuals with sensorineural hearing loss, incorporating biologically-inspired algorithms into external signal processing devices could provide speech enhancement benefits to cochlear implantees. In this study we first constructed a computational signal processing algorithm to mimic auditory cortex contrast tuning. We then manipulated the shape of contrast channels and evaluated the intelligibility of reconstructed noisy speech using a metric to predict cochlear implant user perception. Candidate speech enhancement strategies were then tested in cochlear implantees with a hearing-in-noise test. Accentuation of intermediate contrast values or all contrast values improved computed intelligibility. Cochlear implant subjects showed significant improvement in noisy speech intelligibility with a contrast shaping procedure.

Language for Winning Hearts and Minds: Verb Aspect in U.S. Presidential Campaign Speeches for Engaging Emotion.

How does language influence the emotions and actions of large audiences? Functionally, emotions help address environmental uncertainty by constraining the body to support adaptive responses and social coordination. We propose emotions provide a similar function in language processing by constraining the mental simulation of language content to facilitate comprehension, and to foster alignment of mental states in message recipients. Consequently, we predicted that emotion-inducing language should be found in speeches specifically designed to create audience alignment – stump speeches of United States presidential candidates. We focused on phrases in the past imperfective verb aspect (“a bad economy was burdening us”) that leave a mental simulation of the language content open-ended, and thus unconstrained, relative to past perfective sentences (“we were burdened by a bad economy”). As predicted, imperfective phrases appeared more frequently in stump versus comparison speeches, relative to perfective phrases. In a subsequent experiment, participants rated phrases from presidential speeches as more emotionally intense when written in the imperfective aspect compared to the same phrases written in the perfective aspect, particularly for sentences perceived as negative in valence. These findings are consistent with the notion that emotions have a role in constraining the comprehension of language, a role that may be used in communication with large audiences.

Tropes as Rhetorical Devices in the Presidential Campaign in Croatia

In this paper authors analyse figurativeness in speeches of presidential candidates during the presidential campaign in Croatia in 2009/2010. This paper explores how the usage of rhetorical tropes in speeches of presidential candidates influenced the election results and number of votes of each candidate. In contrast to the other figures of speech, tropes are more closely related to content than to form or structure. Rhetorical tropes fulfil many different purposes in political discourse, especially in regard to positive political self-presentation and negative political other-presentation. Rhetorical tropes analysed in this paper are divided according to the Burke’s (1969) classification: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony. The metaphor is analysed and outlined as one of the master tropes. In Croatian political discourse metaphor is most commonly drawn from the sports and military terminology, for example, the expressions “political competition“, “presidential race“, “leading the political battle“. Authors compare usage of rhetorical tropes with the success of presidential candidates in the above mentioned presidential campaign. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2016.v5n1p23

Deception in Speeches of Candidates for Public Office

The contribution of this article is twofold: the adaptation and application of models of deception from psychology, combined with data-mining techniques, to the text of speeches given by candidates in the 2008 U.S. presidential election; and the observation of both short-term andmedium-term differences in the levels of deception. Rather than considering the effect of deception on voters, deception is used as a lens through which to observe the self-perceptions of candidates and campaigns. The method of analysis is fully automated and requires no human coding, and so can be applied to many other domains in a straightforward way. The authors posit explanations for the observed variation in terms of a dynamic tension between the goals of campaigns at each moment in time, for example gaps between their view of the candidate’s persona and the persona expected for the position; and the difficulties of crafting and sustaining a persona, for example, the cognitive cost and the need for apparent continuity with past actions and perceptions. The changes in the resulting balance provide a new channel by which to understand the drivers of political campaigning, a channel that is hard to manipulate because its markers are created subconsciously.

Matching Pennies on the Campaign Trail: An Empirical Study of Senate Elections and Media Coverage

We study the strategic interaction between the media and Senate candidates during elections. While the media is instrumental for candidates to communicate with voters, candidates and media outlets have conflicting preferences over the contents of the reporting. In competitive electoral environments such as most US Senate races, this can lead to a strategic environment resembling a matching pennies game. Based on this observation, we develop a model of bipartisan races where media outlets report about candidates, and candidates make decisions on the type of constituencies to target with their statements along the campaign trail. We develop a methodology to classify news content as suggestive of the target audience of candidate speech, and show how data on media reports and poll results, together with the behavioral implications of the model, can be used to estimate its parameters. We implement this methodology on US Senatorial races for the period 1980-2012, and find that Democratic candidates have stronger incentives to target their messages towards turning out their core supporters than Republicans. We also find that the cost in swing-voter support from targeting core supporters is larger for Democrats than for Republicans. These effects balance each other, making media outlets willing to cover candidates from both parties at similar rates.

18대 대통령 선거 후보자의 연설문 네트워크 분석: 단어의 가시성(visibility)과 단어 간 연결성(connectivity)을 중심으로

이 연구는 제18대 대통령 선거에 출마했던 후보자들의 연설문 담화를 네트워크 관점에서 접근 해 구조적으로 분석하고 연설문에 내재된 의미를 파악하고자 했다. 이를 위해 연설문 담화에서 언급된 단어의 가시성(visibility)과 단어 간 연결성(connectivity)을 살펴보았다. 단어의 가시성은 특정 단어가 얼마나 자주 등장 하는지로, 단어 간 연결성은 네트워크 분석을 통해 연설문에 언급된 단어 간 상호작용을 그래프로 나타내 파악하였다. 박 후보의 경우 '국민행복'과 '약속'이 핵심 키워드로, 문 후보의 경우 '정권교체'와 '한반도,' 안 후보의 경우 '국민'과 '변화'가 핵심 키워드로 나타났다. 이 단어를 중심으로 어떤 단어들이 서로 연결되었는지 네트워크 분석을 하였다. 단어 간 중심성을 분석한 결과 박 후보의 경우 국민과 대한민국, 국민행복, 신뢰가, 문 후보의 경우 대한민국, 보통사람, 국민, 정권교체가, 안 후보의 경우 국민, 정치, 변화가 단어들 간의 관계에서 중심 역할을 하는 것으로 나타났다. 이 연구는 이론적인 측면에서 단어의 네트워크 분석을 통해 대통령 연설문에 내재된 의미를 실증적으로 파악했다는 점에서 의미가 있다. 방법론적인 측면에서는 대통령 후보자의 연설문 담화에 대한 단어 간 연결성을 구조적 측면에서 파악했다는 점에서 정치 커뮤니케이션 연구 분야의 확장에 기여하였다. This study explores the political meaning of candidate's speech and statement who run for the 18th presidential election in the viewpoint of communication. The visibility of the words and the connectivity between the words are analyzed in the viewpoint of structural aspect and the vision, policy. The visibility of the words is analyzed based on the frequency of the words mentioned in the speech or the statement. The connectivity between the words are analyzed based on the network analysis and expressed by graph. In the case of candidate Park, the key word is the happiness of the people and appointment. The key word for candidate Moon is regime change and the Korean Peninsula and the key word for candidate Ahn is the people and change. This study contributes positively to the study of candidate's discourse in the viewpoint of methodology by using network analysis and exploring scientifically the connectivity of the words. In the theoretical aspect this study uses the results of network analysis for revealing what is the leadership components in the speech and the statement. In conclusion, this study highlights the extension of the communication studies.

Woman President: Confronting Postfeminist Political Culture. By Kristina HornSheeler and Karrin VasbyAnderson. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2013. 242 pp.

Woman President: Confronting Postfeminist Political Culture. By Kristina Horn Sheeler and Karrin Vasby Anderson. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2013. 242 pp. Why America yet to elect a woman president? By assembling the disparate discourses of women presidential candidates--campaign oratory, political journalism, punditry, and popular culture--Kristina Horn Sheeler and Karrin Vasby Anderson have written a solidly scholarly book that seeks answers to this question. In doing so, Woman President takes the reader from Victoria Woodhull's radical outspokenness to Hillary Clinton's carefully choreographed Internet announcement speech of 2008. The book focuses on the backlash against female presidential candidates, or their presidentiality, as the authors consistently write (p. 1). Sheeler and Anderson argue that there is an undeclared war (p. 3) against the American woman president, and in each chapter they present the many weapons used in that war. In the first chapter, the authors explore the constraint of the pioneer as a frame for women presidential candidates. This frame, the authors assert, has been applied to each woman candidate for the U.S. presidency since the nineteenth century (p. 17), and erodes her credibility by accentuating the oddity of a woman as president. The authors do a fine job of arguing that what seems like an accolade--being the first in uncharted waters--instead becomes a liability, as it more often than not makes each woman seem more a novelty than a viable candidate. The authors also deconstruct four women presidential candidates' announcement speeches to determine how each woman managed the pioneer metaphor to position herself as a presidential candidate--choosing Victoria Woodhull, Shirley Chisholm, Elizabeth Dole, and Carol Moseley-Braun as the rhetors. The longest chapter in the book, on fictional portrayals of the presidency, argues that viewing women presidents on screen is a propositional argument that women can serve as chief executives. The analysis asserts that television and film are good vehicles for negotiating the multiple perspectives of women and the presidency. This chapter is entertaining, but of course, one must first accept the argument that these screen portrayals matter. If the reader accepts that screen appearances do make an impact on the electability of women presidential candidates, then the authors' considerable attention to those portrayals will be convincing. In contrast, the chapter on presidential campaign oratory offers a less comprehensive analysis of the words of women candidates. A review of convention speeches of candidates from 1980 to 2008 demonstrates a consistent attempt to masculinize the male nominees as a means of showing their fitness for office. …

Power through ‘Us’: Leaders’ Use of We-Referencing Language Predicts Election Victory

Leaders have been observed to use distinct rhetorical strategies, but it is unclear to what extent such strategies are effective. To address this issue we analyzed the official election campaign speeches of successful and unsuccessful Prime Ministerial candidates in all 43 Australian Federal elections since independence from Britain in 1901 and measured candidates' use of personal (‘I’, ‘me’) and collective pronouns (‘we’, ‘us’). Victors used more collective pronouns than their unsuccessful opponents in 80% of all elections. Across all elections, victors made 61% more references to ‘we’ and ‘us’ and used these once every 79 words (vs. every 136 words for losers). Extending social identity theorizing, this research suggests that electoral endorsement is associated with leaders' capacity to engage with, and speak on behalf of, a collective identity that is shared with followers whose support and energies they seek to mobilize.

Pledge, Promise, or Commit: New York's Tenuous Limitations on Judicial Campaign Speech

A decade has passed since Republican Party of Minnesota v. White, the landmark Supreme Court decision loosening speech restrictions on judicial candidates. White involved the announcements of legal and political views. New York limits speech concerning the extent to which judicial candidates may pledge, promise, or commit to legal or political positions. As these categories partially overlap in their applicability to a given campaign statement, New York judicial candidates must carefully navigate what they can and cannot say to avoid disciplinary censure. This Article sets out to determine the precise delineation of what can and cannot be said in New York and whether the legal speech that remains is a constitutionality valid limit. Ultimately, the restrictions are problematic because of the limited state interest in restricting judicial candidate speech and the false idea that speech that does not favor one set of legal interests or class of litigants over another can be sufficiently meaningful to the electorate to satisfy the relevant First Amendment interests.

A Speech Act Analysis of the Acceptance of Nomination Speeches of Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Chief M.K.O. Abiola

This study investigates the role of language in the communication and interpretation of intentions by examining selected political speeches as pieces of discourse with specific goals. It presents and documents some of the significant illocutionary acts that convey the intentions of speakers in the acceptance of nomination speeches of presidential candidates in Nigeria. The acceptance of nomination speeches of Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Chief M.K.O. Abiola form the bulk of our data. The study is based on insight from J.L. Austin (1962) speech act theory. Five categories of speech acts identified by Searle’s (1969, 1976) are significant in the speeches. They include assertive acts (27.3%), expressive acts (22.70%), commissive acts (22.70%), directive acts (18.2%) and declarative acts which account for 9.1% of the total data. The study has revealed that the acceptance of nomination speeches are characterised by illocutionary acts that are used to achieve persuasion. Hence, the data are characterised by a preponderance of assertive, expressive and commissive acts that are mostly used as mobilization strategies, especially in political campaigns, where it is essential for candidates to persuade their listeners to win elections. The acts performed in the speeches examined are essentially similar; however, they were encoded more explicitly by Chief Abiola than Chief Awolowo.

Coalition Agreements and Party Preferences: A Principal Components Analysis Approach

How do coalitions’ policies and the preferences of their member parties relate? Attempts to answer this question have looked at the connection between party manifestos and the policy intentions of the government as expressed in the coalition agreement or declaration. This paper tries to make a twofold contribution to this literature. First, unlike other studies that rely on alternative techniques, we defend the use of Principal Components Analysis (PCA) as an appropriate method to automatically evaluate how similar/different are the documents measuring party preferences and the coalition agreement and obtain the distances between them, without the need of an ideological scaling. Second, in addition to party manifestos, we also use parliamentary speeches in the investiture debate to capture the preferences of parties. Using data from the Spanish regional coalition governments between 2005 and 2011, we find that i) the use of PCA does lead to the emergence of substantively and statistically significant relationships between party preferences and coalition agreements, and ii) the use of parliamentary speeches tends to provide more plausible results than manifestos, which signals speeches as relevant documents for the study of coalition politics. In particular, we show that it is difficult to predict which specific member party will succeed at bringing the agreement closer to its preferences, but the priority seems to be moving the agreement away from the opposition parties. Interestingly, we also find that there is a specially strong connection between the candidate speech in the investiture debate and the coalition agreement. ∗Preliminary draft: comments welcomed. This study acknowledges the research support from the project Coalition Agreements and Government Formation in Spain, 1979-2011 (CSO2010-16337). †Department of Constitutional Law and Political Science, University of Barcelona, Diagonal 684, 08034 Barcelona, Spain. E-mail: afalcogimeno@ub.edu ‡Department of Constitutional Law and Political Science, University of Barcelona, Diagonal 684, 08034 Barcelona, Spain. E-mail: vallbe@ub.edu

A Failure to Report? Presidential Election Politics and the 2008 Economic Crisis

This paper addresses a key question that has thus far received scant attention: How do presidential candidates frame, spin, and sell the economic news on the campaign trail? A controlled random sample of 180 news articles was taken between August 2008 to November 2008 from six regionally diverse newspapers, The New York Times, USA Today, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Denver Post, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Philadelphia Inquirer. In spite of conventional expectations related to candidate discussions, economics along with general defense issues and energy/environment were the most discussed policy issues in the 2008 election. Economic news reporting, thus, is dependent upon political cycles, presidential candidates, and varying economic concerns. Additionally, the evidence suggests that both candidate concerns and contemporary economic issues drive candidate speech related to the economy.

Developing Good Working Relationships Among Personnel in the OR and SPD

Developing Good Working Relationships Among Personnel in the OR and SPD

An Unlikely Pragmatist

Toward the end of James Kloppenberg's Reading Obama , the author ponders an anecdote from the candidate's speech on race in Philadelphia in March 2008: Obama reported that a young white woman named Ashley, telling fellow volunteers in South Carolina why she'd joined the Obama campaign, explained that to save money for her cancer-stricken, bankrupted mother, she'd pretended to love mustard and relish sandwiches. She was volunteering, she said, in hopes of improving health care for families like hers. When an elderly black man's turn came to tell why he'd joined, he said, simply, "'I am here because of Ashley,'" and Obama told his Philadelphia audience that "That single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is where we start." But it's only a start, especially for Kloppenberg, who writes, "Placing the speech in the context drawn from civic republicanism and communitarianism, from discourse ethics and deliberative democracy, from historicism and Rawls' overlapping consensus, from Geertz's hermeneutics and the neopragmatists' emphasis on fallibilism, it is easy to see in the speech most of the principal components of Obama's worldview."

Deception in Speeches of Candidates for Public Office

The contribution of this article is twofold: the adaptation and application of models of deception from psychology, combined with data-mining techniques, to the text of speeches given by candidates in the 2008 U.S. presidential election; and the observation of both short-term and medium-term differences in the levels of deception. The method of analysis is fully automated and requires no human coding, and so can be applied to many other domains in a straightforward way. The authors posit explanations for the observed variation in terms of a dynamic tension between the goals of campaigns at each moment in time, for example gaps between their view of the candidate’s persona and the persona expected for the position; and the difficulties of crafting and sustaining a persona, for example, the cognitive cost and the need for apparent continuity with past actions and perceptions. The changes in the resulting balance provide a new channel by which to understand the drivers of political campaigning, a channel that is hard to manipulate because its markers are created subconsciously.

The Real (Lack of) Difference between Republicans and Democrats: A Computer Word Score Analysis of Party Platforms, 1996–2004

For years voters and political pundits have grumbled about the lack of real choice between Republicans and Democrats. Scholars have examined party behavior and suggested reasons for concern. Determining whether there is a real ideological and policy difference between U.S. political parties, and the nature of that difference, is important for political science and for democratic politics generally. Ultimately, democracy is about choices, and where choices are few, democracy is degraded. One way to examine the choices that political parties offer voters is by assessing their political platforms. Even in an era of candidate-centric politics, political party platforms spell out the general programs offered by the parties, and the platforms are heavily influenced by the policy positions of the candidates themselves. In addition, the political platform is the one document that spells out the entire program of the party. Individual candidate speeches capture only snippets (at best) of the policy choices offered to voters. Recent innovations in computerized content analysis make it possible to analyze large bodies of text such as party platforms in a systematic way by treating words as data, then analyzing them statistically.

The Valence Advantage of Presidential Persuasion: Do Presidential Candidates Use Oratory to Persuade Citizens to Vote Contrary to Ideological Preferences?

Can voters be persuaded to support a candidate based on a candidate's communication skills instead of a candidate's issue positions? Combining theoretical insights on voter decision-making drawn from valence theories of candidate-position taking with insights from theories of rhetoric and persuasion, we argue that candidate rhetoric can sway voters to a candidate's side. We examine the sophistication and style of candidate speech in U.S. presidential elections from 1976-2004 using Flesch-Kincaid grade-level measures and Diction measures of presidential speech. We find that more sophisticated campaign speech by a candidate results in a higher likelihood that a citizen will vote for that candidate, though this effect of linguistic sophistication is conditioned by voter cognition. The most highly educated voters are most likely to use the non-policy dimension of complex rhetoric in casting their vote. This finding runs contrary to the conventional wisdom that higher educated voters - because of their cognitive abilities - would be most likely to vote 'rationally' based primarily on issue preferences. We also find that candidates who present themselves using language that draws on themes of commonality, activity, and realism are more likely to win a citizen's vote in the election. These results suggest that rhetoric matters: it can sway voters, but it also suggests that soaring and powerful rhetoric can be offset when the voter perceives high ideological congruence with the rhetorically-disadvantaged candidate.

Winning the War of Words: The “Front Group” Label in Contemporary Consumer Politics

When political interest contend for public support, both money and legitimacy are critical resources. Money is especially useful in disseminating ideas, while legitimacy aids their reception and acceptance. In political contests pitting private interest such as large corporations against public interest groups, private interest are relatively well endowed with financial resources. These resources can be used to purchase public relations expertise, plant favorable news articles, conduct push polls,1 and commission self-serving research. In contrast, public interest such as those in the consumer, environmental, and government reform movements tend to have the advantages of legitimacy in the eyes of the public because these purport to represent society as a whole. Thus, a pivotal task for public interest is to mobilize resources (McCarthy and Zald 1212; see also Jenkins), while private interest must either bolster their own legitimacy or undermine that of their public interest adversaries. Private interest often try to build their public legitimacy by employing the technique, that is, delivering their message through the mouth of an apparently impartial or independent party (Bernays 20). These third parties are often scientists working in industry-funded think tanks or journalists who, knowingly or not, uncritically disseminate information contained in company news releases, canned video news reports, or planted editorials.2 Another third-party technique is to establish, fund, and control an artificial public interest group. These are typically designed by public relations firms to look like spontaneous outpourings of grassroots public sentiment. By clothing the arguments of private interest in the mantle of the public interest, these third-party organizations pose a serious challenge to the legitimacy of traditional3 public interest groups. These traditional public interest attempt to delegitimate their artificial competitors by labeling them as astroturf lobbyists4 or, more commonly, groups (Stauber and Rampton 79). The subject of this article is the use of the term as a symbolic weapon in consumer politics. This article begins by locating the study of front group accusations within previous research on the political uses of language. Then the article reviews the state of research on front and some difficulties in defining them. The heart of the article examines the use of the term as a political tool within the domain of consumer politics, asking: Who directs the term at whom, through what channels of communication, and with what apparent effect? The article's final section argues that front group accusations are part and parcel of a dynamic political culture and merit further study. Political Language The study of the political functions of language has a long tradition, especially under the rubric of rhetoric. The word is derived from a Greek word meaning orator (Schiappa 4), so the speeches of political leaders are the most frequent subject of rhetorical analysis. The study of political rhetoric also encompasses the speech of individuals who seek to influence political leaders, such as leaders of social movements and fringe political parties. Rhetorical analysis typically focuses on big blocks of text such as a candidate's speech, an interest group's position paper, or a newspaper's editorial. It then seeks the elements of form and content that contribute to a text's persuasiveness. More recently, best-selling books like George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant! and Geoffrey's Nunberg's Going Nucular have drawn attention to the political functions of individual words or catchphrases, such as pro-life versus pro-choice or affirmative action versus reverse discrimination. These phrases are designed to slant or spin the content of a message. …

Noise Reduction in Time Domain Using Referential Reconstruction

We present a novel approach for single-channel noise reduction of speech signals contaminated by additive noise. In this approach, the system requires speech samples to be uttered in advance by the same speaker as that of the input signal. Speech samples used in this method must have enough phonetic variety to reconstruct the input signal. In the proposed method, which we refer to as referential reconstruction, we have used a small database created from examples of speech, which will be called reference signals. Referential reconstruction uses an example-based approach, in which the objective is to find the candidate speech frame which is the most similar to the clean input frame without noise, although the input frame is contaminated with noise. When candidate frames are found, they become final outputs without any special processing. In order to find the candidate frames, a correlation coefficient is used as a similarity measure. Through automatic speech recognition experiments, the proposed method was shown to be effective, particularly for low-SNR speech signals corrupted with white noise or noise in high-frequency bands. Since the direct implementation of this method requires infeasible computational cost for searching through reference signals, a coarse-to-fine strategy is introduced in this paper.