Non-Major-Party Candidates and Televised Presidential Debates: The Merits of Legislative Inclusion

Critical Discourse Analysis of Hedges and Boosters in Iranian TV Election Debates of Presidential Candidates

To win the attention of the audience, presidential candidates rely on their own rhetorical methods. Hedges and boosters as metadiscourse markers have been the focus of many studies as the communicative strategies enabling speakers to soften the force of utterances or moderate their assertive force. TV news was used as the corpus of this study, whereas most of the previous studies have focused o...

Inflation or Moderation? Presidential Runoffs, Legislative Party Systems, and Coalitions

Nearly half of the world’s presidential democracies choose their chief executives using a majority-runoff electoral rule (MRO), while most others used single-round plurality. What difference does it make? On the one hand, critics of MRO assert that the lower threshold of the first round inflates the number of presidential candidates, and with it the size of the party system. A fragmented party ...

Semantic networks and competition: Election year winners and losers in U.S. televised presidential debates, 1960-2004

Drawing on network theory, this study considers the content of U.S. presidential debates and how candidates’ language differentiates them. Semantic network analyses of all U.S. presidential debates (1960–2004) were conducted. Results reveal that regardless of party affiliation, election winners were more central in their semantic networks than losers. Although the study does not argue causation...

Televised Debates in Parliamentary Democracies

Violence Metaphors in Presidential Debates

In an election year, political messaging can become feisty or even violent. In the 2012 U.S. presidential election, Americans were inundated with statements that metaphorically referred to violence, such as “Romney slams Obama” and”Romney slaughtered Obama.” Such expressions grab our attention and resonate with our understanding of actual physical violence. Despite their frequent use in electio...