Search results

The 2008 presidential campaign was unusual for a number of reasons. For the first time since 1952, neither the President nor the Vice President contended for the Oval Office. This meant highly contested primaries in both major political parties. As the Democratic primary ground toward the end, the leading candidates were an African-American–Barack Obama–and a woman–Hillary Clinton. More money was raised and spent on the primary campaign than ever before. This means that the campaign messages in this election deserve scholarly attention. This study applies Benoit's Functional Theory and Petrocik's Issue Ownership Theory to primary campaign ads from both major parties in this campaign. Ads from both political parties used acclaims more than attacks (no defenses occurred in these ads) and discussed policy more than character. They discussed the issues owned by their own party more than those owned by the opposing party. Despite the unusual features of this election, the campaign mes-sages produced were similar to those from previous campaigns.

An experiment involving 485 participants provided evidence for second-level agenda-setting effects of manipulated print media stories about the 2006 war in Lebanon. Investigators (1) measured readers' perceptions of the war's involved parties, Israel and Hezbollah, and (2) compared specific attributes that readers in each condition assigned to Israel and Hezbollah. Results demonstrated significant differences in attributes and perceptions of Israel and Hezbollah among five conditions. Computer content analysis of open-ended responses demonstrated a relationship between the version of the news story read by participants and the attributes that the participants assigned to Israel and Hezbollah.

The 2012 election season provided increased opportunities for the collaboration among citizens, new media, and democracy. The "social media election" saw a rise in online user-generated political content posted to YouTube. These videos, often satirical in nature, were viewed by millions, making the potential impacts from this new form of political communication deserving of inquiry. Using experimental design, this study explored the relationship between user-generated political satire and "normative" political attitudes. The results revealed that viewing satirical representations of political candidates did not affect individuals' level of political cynicism or political information efficacy; however, perceptions of candidate credibility and favorability were altered.

This study explores the effects of televised presidential debate viewing on young citizens' candidate evaluations and normative democratic attitudes, including political cynicism and political information efficacy. Findings revealed that debate viewing decreases young citizens' political cynicism and strengthens political information efficacy. Longitudinal analysis tracked young citizens' democratic attitudes from pre-debate to post-election, finding that one's political information efficacy intensifies throughout the course of the ongoing campaign, but debates' immediate effect of reducing political cynicism is not sustained as the campaign progresses.

This study analyzes viewer assessments of Sara Palin's vice presidential debate performance. Specifically, a national sample of debate viewers evaluated Palin and her vice presidential opponent Joe Biden on both image and issue measures before and after viewing their debate performance. We argue that the attendant media attention surrounding Palin before her debate performance—mostly negative in tone—framed Palin as unfit for office and created expectations that she would fail in her debate with Joe Biden. On several measures, however, Palin's debate performance actually exceeded the low-bar of expectations that had been set, thus benefiting her in terms of viewers' assessments of her debate performance.

President George W. Bush was completing his second (and final) term in office and Vice President Dick Cheney decided not to run for president. Thus, the 2008 American presidential primary is the first "open" campaign (with no sitting president or vice president competing) since 1952 with highly competitive primaries for both major political parties. This study uses content analysis to investigate news coverage (national newspapers, network television news, and local newspapers) of the 2008 American presidential primary campaign. Most themes in the news concerned the horse race (66%) with somewhat more emphasis on the candidates' character (18%) than their policy proposals (15%). The most common topics of horse race comments were campaign strategy (24%), campaign events (19%), polls (17%), and predictions (12%). More news comments were positive (62%) than negative (32%) with few comments about the candidate's defenses (7%). Most comments were unattributed (statements by journalists: 66%); candidates were quoted or paraphrased in about one in five comments; the remaining comments were from supporters (8%) or others (7%).

This study investigates the extent to which candidates in the 2008 presidential primary campaign adhered to the convention wisdom that candidates should stay "on message." Content analysis investigated multiple media (announcement speeches, TV spots, radio spots, debates, candidate webpages, and candidate MySpace/Facebook pages) from 9 Democratic and 12 Republican candidates. Four variables were investigated: functions, topics, party issue emphasis, and own party issue ownership. Although there was considerable consistency across message form, results revealed that 63 of 76 comparisons candidates were not consistent in tone, topic, party issue emphasis, or own party issue emphasis across messages. Post hoc analyses excluding debates (where the candidates have less control over the content of their messages, given the expectation that they will respond to the questions asked) revealed differences even among the message forms over which candidates have complete control over content.