Suchergebnisse

Public knowledge presents a persistent problem for democratic deliberation. While especially salient for public participation in technical decision-making, scholars agree that all deliberations are best informed by quality, shared information. But what kind of knowledge is required in deliberation? Can deliberative practices foster requisite learning? Through rhetorical analysis of 20 small-group, public conversations about water policy in Kansas, USA, I sought to describe cultural understandings of public knowledge to inform future research and deliberative practice. Discussants voiced three epistemologies, which I label cognitivist, sociocultural, and behaviorist, each with distinct implications for democracy. I argue that researchers and practitioners should further consider how and when to foreground epistemological assumptions in deliberation. I also question whether facts are the most critical information for community self-determination, and instead argue that deliberators be pushed to openly discuss their values.

Public knowledge presents a persistent problem for democratic deliberation. While especially salient for public participation in technical decision-making, scholars agree that all deliberations are best informed by quality, shared information. But what kind of knowledge is required in deliberation? Can deliberative practices foster requisite learning? Through rhetorical analysis of 20 small-group, public conversations about water policy in Kansas, USA, I sought to describe cultural understandings of public knowledge to inform future research and deliberative practice. Discussants voiced three epistemologies, which I label cognitivist, sociocultural, and behaviorist, each with distinct implications for democracy. I argue that researchers and practitioners should further consider how and when to foreground epistemological assumptions in deliberation. I also question whether facts are the most critical information for community self-determination, and instead argue that deliberators be pushed to openly discuss their values.

Here, we track the language patterns of Mitt Romney and other Republican candidates during 2008 and 2012 and contrast them with their Democratic counterparts to better understand the language of partisanship in the U.S. We employ DICTION ( www.dictionsoftware.com ), an automated text-analysis tool, to process some 8,000 campaign documents. We find (a) that Mitt Romney was an unconventional Republican in 2012 (but not in 2008); (b) that Romney employed both "Republican" and "Democratic" language and did so to good effect (both in the primaries and in the general election); (c) that Barack Obama matched Romney in these ways, departing sharply from his own 2008 campaign style; and (d) that the candidates increasingly resembled one another as election day approached. We conclude that, no matter what their party of origin, all national politicians must be versed in the Democratic/Republican lexicon, a requirement that distinguishes the American political ethos.

This study reports certain lexical patterns produced during the general election of campaign 2008 by Senators John McCain and Barack Obama. As such, it continues a series of tracings begun a dozen years ago under the rubric of the Campaign Mapping Project. This is largely a descriptive project employing computerized language analysis, making specific use of the DICTION 5.0 program. The authors examine some 700 speech passages delivered during the primaries of 2007 and the general election of 2008 and compare them to around 4,000 passages from the 1948 through 2004 presidential campaigns. Overall, they find that popular understanding of the Obama style—that he is fiery, poetic, optimistic, and grandiloquent—to be wrong. Instead, they find Obama to be cautious, grounded, and highly focused. McCain, in contrast, was personal in style, quite partisan (as are most losing presidential candidates), and highly embellished. Obama's "cool" style differed dramatically from McCain's "emotional" style, thereby providing both a political and rhetorical contrast for voters during the 2008 campaign.

"It's not what you say, but how you say it. Solving problems with words is the essence of politics, and finding the right words for the moment can make or break a politician's career. Yet very little has been said in political science about the elusive element of tone. In Political Tone, Roderick P. Hart, Jay P. Childers, and Colene J. Lind analyze a range of texts--from speeches and debates to advertising and print and broadcast campaign coverage-- using a sophisticated computer program, DICTION, that parses their content for semantic features like realism, commonality, and certainty, as well as references to religion, party, or patriotic terms. Beginning with a look at how societal forces like diversity and modernity manifest themselves as political tones in the contexts of particular leaders and events, the authors proceed to consider how individual leaders have used tone to convey their messages: How did Bill Clinton's clever dexterity help him recover from the Monica Lewinsky scandal? How did Barack Obama draw on his experience as a talented community activist to overcome his inexperience as a national leader? And how does Sarah Palin's wandering tone indicate that she trusts her listeners and is open to their ideas? By focusing not on the substance of political arguments but on how they were phrased, Political Tone provides powerful and unexpected insights into American politics."--Publisher's website