Vice-Presidential Debate Research Articles

Assessing the 1992 Presidential and Vice Presidential Debates: The Public Rationale

Since the 1960 presidential debate, the scholarly community, media, and public have devoted substantial energy to determining the winners and losers of presidential and vice presidential debates. This preoccupation has prompted criticism because it diverts attention from the substance available in public debates (Berquist & Golden, 1981; Jamieson & Birdsell, 1988). Notwithstanding the merits of such criticism, voters continue to assign victory and defeat in even the closest and most ambiguous debate contests (Sears & Chaffee, 1979). The reasons voters use to explain their choices of winners and losers in presidential and vice presidential debates remain unclear. Numerous studies address whether personal attributes/presidential skills weigh more heavily than a discussion of the policy issues in the decision-making calculus of voters (see, for example, Berquist & Golden, 1981; Glass, 1985; Miller & MacKuen, 1979). The tendency to reduce the breadth of rationales employed by the electorate into a dichotomous framework (i.e., issue vs. image), however, prevents a more thorough understanding of the reasoning processes of the public. Vancil and Pendell (1984) take a first step toward broadening the understanding of voter rationales in their analysis of the 1980 Carter-Reagan presidential debate. Basing their results on a survey of the presidential debate literature, a post hoc review of a limited telephone survey, and their own conceptual analysis, they propose six criteria for assessing performance in political debates. These include the pre-debate candidate preference, consistency with viewer positions on the issues, superior skills of advocacy, superior presidential personality, profiting from a major blunder of the opponent, and the media's choice of winner. The methodology used in Vancil and Pendell's telephone survey, however, limited the public's responses to predetermined options spawned from previous research findings. For example, viewers were asked, viewing the debate between Presidential candidates, do you think it is most important to find out the candidate's stands on the issues, or to find out which candidate has the personality and leadership qualities a President should have?. While a complete accounting of the questions asked of respondents is not available, the weaknesses inherent in the study's methodology prompt even Vancil and Pendell to admit that the criteria they identify do not exhaust the possibilities. By providing potential voters an open-ended opportunity to explain their reasons for choosing winners and losers in the first 1992 presidential debate and the 1992 vice presidential debate, this study expands understanding about the electorate's schemas. These debates constituted substantial campaign events as eighty-one million viewers watched the October 11 presidential debate and seventy-six million Americans observed the October 13 vice presidential debate (Carmody, 1992). In addition to discovering the reasons given by the public for choosing winners and losers, this study seeks to determine if various subgroups of the electorate use different reasons for judging debate performance. Previous research has indicated that educational status (Glass, 1985), party affiliation (Campbell, et al., 1960), audience predisposition (Leuthold & Valentine, 1982; Sears & Chaffee, 1979; Sigelman & Sigelman, 1984), and media coverage (Lang & Lang, 1978; Lanoue & Schrott, 1991; Lowery, Bridges, & Barefield, 1990; Miller & MacKuen, 1979) influence voter perceptions of candidate performance, but none has specifically addressed whether the rationales for choosing winners and losers varies according to these factors. This study analyzes whether viewership of the debates, demographic groupings, party affiliation, media usage, and choice of particular candidates as winners or losers constitute subgroups that use different reasoning in assessing candidate performance. …

Enacting the presidency: political argument, presidential debates, and presidential character

Political Debates and the Enactment of Leadership The First Kennedy-Nixon Debate The Second, Third, and Fourth Kennedy-Nixon Debates The 1976 Presidential Debates: Gerald Ford versus Jimmy Carter The 1980 Debates: Ronald Reagan versus John Anderson and Ronald Reagan versus Jimmy Carter The 1984 Presidential Debates: Ronald Reagan versus Walter Mondale The 1988 Presidential Debates: George Bush versus Michael Dukakis The Vice Presidential Debates of 1976, 1984, and 1988 Re-Assessing the Rhetorical Functions of Political Debates Selected Bibliography Index

Rhetorical studies of national political debates, 1960-1988

Introduction by Robert V. Friedenberg The 1960 Kennedy-Nixon Presidential Debates by Theodore O. Windt Jr. The 1976 Carter-Ford Presidential Debates by Goodwin Berquist The 1976 Mondale-Dole Vice Presidential Debate by Kevin Sauter The 1980 Reagan-Carter Presidential Debate by Kurt Ritter and David Henry The 1984 Reagan-Mondale Presidential Debates by Craig Allen Smith and Kathy B. Smith The 1984 Bush-Ferraro Vice Presidential Debate by Judith S. Trent The 1988 Bush-Dukakis Presidential Debates by Halford Ross Ryan The 1988 Quayle-Bentsen Vice Presidential Debate by Warren D. Decker The 1992 Clinton-Bush-Perot Presidential Debates by Dan F. Hahn The 1992 Gore-Quayle-Stockdale Vice Presidential Debate by L. Patrick Devlin Patterns and Trends in National Political Debates: 1960-1992 by Robert V. Friedenberg Selected Bibliography on Political Camapign Debating Index

Perceptions of the 1988 Presidential and Vice-Presidential Debates

Perceptions of the 1988 Presidential and Vice-Presidential Debates

Verbal, vocal, and visible factors in judgments of another's affect.

Columbia University Two studies investigated the extent to which variance in observers' judgments of affect made on the basis of full-channel (audiovisual) presentations is accounted for by verbal (written transcripts), vocal (content-filtered speech), and visible (silent video) information. Stimulus materials for Study 1 were taken from the 1976 Dole-Mondale vice-presidential debate, and those for Study 2 were taken from personal interviews with female undergraduates. Judges in both studies rated the emotion conveyed in each stimulus segment on scales taken from the semantic differential. Multiple regression of ratings from the full-channel conditon onto each of the single-channel conditions revealed that verbal content was the best predictor of evaluative judgments in both studies. Transcripts also proved to be the best predictor of potency and activity ratings in Study 2, although these findings were not consistent with the results of Study 1. Overall, no support was found for the widespread assumption that nonverbal channels (vocal or visible information) form the primary basis for the communication of affect. The content of human communication conventionally is partitioned into two categories: verbal and nonverbal. The nonverbal