This study provides an empirical and analytical look at how obituaries, as a relatively unexplored form of journalism, illuminate the long-term and conscious cultural work that journalists do. ...Through in-depth qualitative interviews with the elite political journalists who wrote and produced news obituaries for former US President George H. W. Bush, I offer a framework for understanding how journalists rewrite, and ‘recast’, drafts of history and Bush’s legacy. Results show how the obituary form, and the process involved in its creation, functions as a unique opportunity for political journalists – who have, perhaps for decades, covered a politician according to the norms of the profession – to now write about him in a way that they are keenly aware will become part of history. This research illustrates how the role of political or ‘hard-news’ journalism shifts when reporters write their final story about a president.
The paper examines how American presidents have discursively constructed citizens (and citizenship) over more than two hundred years of American political history from an interdisciplinary ...perspective. As one deeply contested concept in different political arenas (Wiesner et al 2017), involving aspects of collective identities, citizens/hip has been at the very heart of Western democracies since ancient times, although its significance has gradually increased in modern periods (Marshall 1950, Bayley et al. 2013).
Decades of research has found that voters’ electoral decisions to a significant degree are affected by character evaluations of candidates. Yet it remains unresolved which specific candidate traits ...voters find most important. In political science it is often argued that competence-related traits are most influential, whereas work in social psychology suggests that warmth-related traits are more influential. Here we test which character trait is the more influential in global candidate evaluations and vote choice using observational data from the ANES 1984–2008 and an original experiment conducted on a representative sample of English partisan respondents. Across the two studies we find that warmth is more influential than competence, leadership and integrity. Importantly, results hold across a wide range of alternative specifications and robustness analyses. We conclude by discussing theoretical and practical implications of the results.
Abstract
An examination of the political discourse of presidents establishes an understanding of the factors that influence word choice and communication. Most notably, the context provided by ...presidents in their political discourse conveys the meaning intended by the speeches, which then influences the way the public reacts to what they have to say. Through knowledge of these factors, linguists can develop a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between language and the perceptions of American presidents by both Americans and non-Americans. The purpose of this paper is to examine the political discourse of two American presidents – George W. Bush and Barack Obama – in order to identify the overall message intended by their speeches and the factors that influence their discourse.
According to both the scientific literature and popular media, all one needs to win a US presidential election is to be taller than one's opponent. Yet, such claims are often based on an arbitrary ...selection of elections, and inadequate statistical analysis. Using data on all presidential elections, we show that height is indeed an important factor in the US presidential elections. Candidates that were taller than their opponents received more popular votes, although they were not significantly more likely to win the actual election. Taller presidents were also more likely to be reelected. In addition, presidents were, on average, much taller than men from the same birth cohort. The advantage of taller candidates is potentially explained by perceptions associated with height: taller presidents are rated by experts as ‘greater’, and having more leadership and communication skills. We conclude that height is an important characteristic in choosing and evaluating political leaders.
From an interdisciplinary framework anchored theoretically in Critical Discourse Analysis and using analytical tools from Systemic Functional Linguistics, this article accounts for a crucial use of ...language in society: the process of legitimization. This article explains specific linguistic ways in which language represents an instrument of control (Hodge and Kress, 1993: 6) and manifests symbolic power (Bourdieu, 2001) in discourse and society. Taking into account previous studies on legitimization (i.e. Martín Rojo and Van Dijk, 1997; Van Dijk, 2005; Van Leeuwen, 1996, 2007, 2008; Van Leeuwen and Wodak, 1999), this particular work develops and proposes some key strategies of legitimization employed by social actors to justify courses of action. The strategies of legitimization can be used individually or in combination with others, and justify social practices through: (1) emotions (particularly fear), (2) a hypothetical future, (3) rationality, (4) voices of expertise and (5) altruism. This article explains how these strategies are linguistically constructed and shaped. This study explains the use of these discursive structures and strategies through examples of speeches given by leaders with differing ideologies, specifically George W. Bush and Barack Obama, in two different armed conflicts, Iraq (2007) and Afghanistan (2009), to underline their justifications of military presence in the notorious 'War on Terror'.
Twitter as political acclamation Hegelich, Simon; Dhawan, Saurabh; Sarhan, Habiba
Frontiers in political science,
09/2023, Letnik:
5
Journal Article
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Acclamation as political form of communication has been used to understand political phenomena by a range of 20th century thinkers and recently has been used to analyze social media. However, if the ...notion of social media as acclamation is to be fruitful, it should be closely connected to inherent features of social media as technology and should be available to empirical analysis. To do so, this study follows a mixed-method approach. First, we offer a theoretical analysis of acclamation and how it links to each of the constituent parts of social media. Next, we build upon this theoretical analysis to study acclamation and social media as a matter of empirical data analysis to analyse the Tweets of the US-Presidents Obama, Trump and Biden. We apply regression models to measure the effects of acclamation. Our results show that acclamation is an essential feature of political communication but different for each President. This is in parts caused by the algorithms of Twitter which have different effects on the communication of the three Presidents. Our findings expand the idea of social media as acclamation and prove its relevance to the current political discourse.
•Exploration of hapax legomena present in a corpus.•Text analysis based on rank size law.•H-index to determine the key hapaxes of a corpus.•Empirical studies of the US President speeches.
This paper ...deals with a quantitative analysis of the content of official political speeches. We study a set of about one thousand talks pronounced by the US Presidents, ranging from Washington to Trump. In particular, we search for the relevance of the rare words, i.e. those said only once in each speech – the so-called hapaxes. We implement a rank-size procedure of Zipf–Mandelbrot type for discussing the hapaxes’ frequencies regularity over the overall set of speeches. Starting from the obtained rank-size law, we define and detect the core of the hapaxes set by means of a procedure based on an Hirsch index variant. We discuss the resulting list of words in the light of the overall US Presidents’ speeches. We further show that this core of hapaxes itself can be well fitted through a Zipf–Mandelbrot law and that contains elements producing deviations at the low ranks between scatter plots and fitted curve – the so-called king and vice-roy effect. Some socio-political insights are derived from the obtained findings about the US Presidents messages.
After stumbling upon a wooden box containing a complete set of miniature wax mold figurines of US presidents at a flea market, artist Alex Forman began photographing each little man, minus their ...pedestals. Presented for the first time in book format, Forman's elegant black and white portraits are accompanied by brief biographies composed entirely of appropriated texts cleverly cut and reassembled by the author. What emerges in Tall, Slim & Erect: Portraits of the Presidents is not the tired tale of legendary men and their mythical quest for democracy, but rather, a gossip's dream: Jefferson could not ride a horse for months due to boils on his backside; Hayes felt a crazed and tender devotion to his sister Fanny; Wilson remained a virgin until twenty-eight. While playfully shedding light on these powerful men, their quirks, bodily functions, and stained sheets, Tall, Slim & Erect ultimately asks the reader to question how history is written and built on hearsay, conjecture, rumor, and repetition.
The speeches stated by influential politicians can have a decisive impact on the future of a country. In particular, the economic content of such speeches affects the economy of countries and their ...financial markets. For this reason, we examine a novel dataset containing the economic content of 951 speeches stated by 45 US Presidents from George Washington (April 1789) to Donald Trump (February 2017). In doing so, we use an economic glossary carried out by means of text mining techniques. The goal of our study is to examine the structure of significant interconnections within a network obtained from the economic content of presidential speeches. In such a network, nodes are represented by talks and links by values of cosine similarity, the latter computed using the occurrences of the economic terms in the speeches. The resulting network displays a peculiar structure made up of a core (i.e. a set of highly central and densely connected nodes) and a periphery (i.e. a set of non-central and sparsely connected nodes). The presence of different economic dictionaries employed by the Presidents characterize the core-periphery structure. The Presidents’ talks belonging to the network’s core share the usage of generic (non-technical) economic locutions like “interest” or “trade”. While the use of more technical and less frequent terms characterizes the periphery (e.g. “yield”). Furthermore, the speeches close in time share a common economic dictionary. These results together with the economics glossary usages during the US periods of boom and crisis provide unique insights on the economic content relationships among Presidents’ speeches.
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