Party Messaging in the U.S. House of Representatives

2021 ◽  
pp. 106591292110297
Author(s):  
Tyler Hughes ◽  
Gregory Koger
Keyword(s):  
House Of Representatives ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Policy Debate ◽  
Strategic Decisions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Substantive Content ◽  
Legislative Agenda ◽  
The Media ◽  
Party Members ◽  
The U.S

Both Congressional parties compete to promote their own reputations while damaging the opposition party’s brand. This behavior affects both policy-making agendas and the party members’ communications with the media and constituents. While there has been ample study of partisan influence on legislative agenda-setting and roll call voting behavior, much less is known about the parties’ efforts to shape the public debate. This paper analyzes two strategic decisions of parties: the timing of collective efforts to influence the public policy debate and the substantive content of these “party messaging” events. These dynamics are analyzed using a unique dataset of 50,195 one-minute speeches delivered on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1989 to 2016. We find a pattern of strategic matching—both parties are more likely to engage in concurrent messaging efforts, often on the same issue.

scholarly journals Corporate Governance of Artificial Intelligence in the Public Interest

Information ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 275
Author(s):  
Peter Cihon ◽  
Jonas Schuett ◽  
Seth D. Baum
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Corporate Governance ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Nonprofit Organizations ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
Department Of Defense ◽  
The Public ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Media ◽  
The U.S

Corporations play a major role in artificial intelligence (AI) research, development, and deployment, with profound consequences for society. This paper surveys opportunities to improve how corporations govern their AI activities so as to better advance the public interest. The paper focuses on the roles of and opportunities for a wide range of actors inside the corporation—managers, workers, and investors—and outside the corporation—corporate partners and competitors, industry consortia, nonprofit organizations, the public, the media, and governments. Whereas prior work on multistakeholder AI governance has proposed dedicated institutions to bring together diverse actors and stakeholders, this paper explores the opportunities they have even in the absence of dedicated multistakeholder institutions. The paper illustrates these opportunities with many cases, including the participation of Google in the U.S. Department of Defense Project Maven; the publication of potentially harmful AI research by OpenAI, with input from the Partnership on AI; and the sale of facial recognition technology to law enforcement by corporations including Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft. These and other cases demonstrate the wide range of mechanisms to advance AI corporate governance in the public interest, especially when diverse actors work together.

How to Better Manage Public Expectations and Information Concerning Oil and Chemical Spill Response

2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 (1) ◽  
pp. 300295
Author(s):  
Doug Helton ◽  
Vicki Loe
Keyword(s):  
Technical Information ◽  
Accurate Information ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Expectations ◽  
Environmentally Sensitive Areas ◽  
Natural Resource Damage Assessment ◽  
The Media ◽  
Response Decisions ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Mechanical Recovery

NOAA's Office of Response and Restoration (OR&R) provides scientific expertise to support incident response and initiates natural resource damage assessment both in the U.S. and internationally. Although OR&R has responded to every major spill in the U.S. over the past 35 years, OR&R continues to face challenges in communicating realistic expectations of response outcomes, in having technical products interpreted correctly by the public, and communicating the degree of uncertainty surrounding such events. Unlike hurricanes, and because large spills are rare and generally man-made, the public expects rapid, complete, and accurate information on the fate and effects, even as the spill event is still unfolding and the response is on-going. An example of a product that is frequently confusing to the public is the OR&R trajectory map, the modeling tool used to predict the possible route of an oil spill. These maps are frequently misinterpreted as the footprint of the spill as opposed to where the oil might go. Another common misconception concerns how much oil can be recovered following a spill. Given the limitations of mechanical recovery, and the rapidity with which oil spreads, evaporates, and disperses at sea, it is impossible to recover all of the spilled oil. Furthermore, oil may be left in environmentally sensitive areas because the attempt to recover the oil could cause irreparable damage. As a result, mechanical recovery generally accounts for less than 5-20% of the overall oil budget, yet the public has an expectation that the goal of a response is to remove all of the oil from the environment. Public pressure, based on these expectations, may result is response decisions that cause more harm than good. This poster will detail a project that will give recommendations on how to manage public expectations on spill response and communicate technical information through the media and elsewhere. The goal of this project, which will be detailed on our poster, is to make OR&R a reliable and comprehensive source of information on ongoing or past spill events and close the disconnect caused by differing expectations.

Which Party Elites Choose to Lead the Nomination Process?

2012 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher L. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
House Of Representatives ◽  
Party Elites ◽  
Strategic Incentives ◽  
Party Members ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Presidential Nominations

Even though political parties maintain control of presidential nominations, little is known about what leads individual party members to participate in the process. Party elites have a collective incentive to nominate an electorally viable and ideologically unifying candidate, and they also have personal, strategic incentives that may foster or prevent their participation in the nominating process. Using endorsement data on a subset of party elites—members of the U.S. House of Representatives—this article finds that individual members of the extended party are strategic with their decision to participate in or abstain from the nomination process.

The promise to the Arab World: Attributes of U.S. President Obama in Arabic-language tweets

2017 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariam F Alkazemi ◽  
Shahira Fahmy ◽  
Wayne Wanta
Keyword(s):  
Arab World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Arabic Language ◽  
President Obama ◽  
Negative Attitudes ◽  
The Public ◽  
New Beginning ◽  
News Organizations ◽  
The Media ◽  
The U.S

U.S. President Barack Obama's much-anticipated address in Egypt in 2009 promised a new beginning between the U.S. government and the Arab world but only a few years later there were many criticisms that the U.S. President did not live up to his promises, driving Arab attitudes toward the United States to their lowest point in years. Five years later, we analyzed Arabic-language twitter messages involving President Obama to examine cognitive and affective attributes. Results show that tweets by members of the media differed greatly from tweets by members of the public. The public tweets held more negative attitudes towards the U.S. President than tweets by news organizations. Members of the public also were more likely to link the President to a wider range of countries, suggesting a greater diversity of attributes, while primarily fixating on the Palestinian issue.

scholarly journals A Paradox in Polarization? Cross-pressured Representatives and the Missing Incentive to Moderate

World Affairs ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 182 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-96
Author(s):  
Benjamin T. Toll
Keyword(s):  
Voting Behavior ◽  
National Level ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Public ◽  
The U.S ◽  
The Way

Members of the public are often left choosing between two extreme candidates who will not represent the moderate, aggregate, public effectively. Cross-pressured members of the U.S. Congress serve a constituency that votes for the opposite party at the national level. If there is any group of representatives that have an incentive to moderate their voting behavior, it is cross-pressured members. In this article, I show that cross-pressured members are more moderate than the average member of their party. This could provide constraints on rampant partisanship in the form of districts that are comfortable electing a representative of one party and voting for the president of the other. However, I show that these members are significantly less likely to be reelected. Thus a paradox exists in which cross-pressured members who moderate their voting behavior are no more likely to be rewarded for behaving the way citizens claim they want to represent.

Covid-19, Media Reporting, and the Role of Bioethicists

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (Special Issue) ◽  
pp. 137-138
Author(s):  
Federico Nicoli ◽  
◽  
Paul J. Cummins ◽  
Joseph A. Raho ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
The Other ◽  
Scientific Uncertainty ◽  
Media Reporting ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Media ◽  
The U.S

"In the aftermath of the 2014 Ebola outbreak, media coverage was scrutinized for sensationalism, weakness in explaining scientific uncertainty, dehumanization of patients, and lack of contextualization. The current COVID-19 crisis presents an opportunity to assess whether the media learned its lesson. Results are mixed. Early reporting on the origin of COVID-19 in “wet markets” indicates that the media continues to do poorly with contextualization. On the other hand, stories on mortality and the infectiousness of COVID-19 indicate there has been improvement. The situation remains fluid as COVID-19 threatens to transform into a pandemic at the time of submission. Data from new countries may alter the reported rates of lethality and infectiousness, and media reporting on these changes may or may not be responsible. The explosion of social media, as a medium to promote reporting, could provide bioethicists a tool to direct the public to reliable stories and criticize inaccurate ones. Using a bioethics perspective, this poster will critically evaluate the quality of U.S. and Italian news media’s reporting on the evolving scientific understanding of COVID-19 and its contextualization. The presentation will employ QR technology to provide links to media coverage of COVID-19 from the U.S. and Italian news media. After critically appraising the quality of COVID-19 reporting, this poster will consider if bioethicists: 1) should provide comment to the media on pandemics; 2) should correct reporting for the public and 3) have a duty to publicly criticize sensationalism in the media. "

scholarly journals Once Again, the Propagandist Media Played it Right and Won by a Knockout-Coverage of George Floyd’s Murder Constitutes the Last Nail in Trump’s Coffin

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 34
Author(s):  
Aysar Tahseen Yaseen
Keyword(s):  
Police Officers ◽  
American People ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
White House ◽  
The Public ◽  
Voice Tone ◽  
Standing Up ◽  
The Media ◽  
And Control ◽  
The U.S

At first it was the coronavirus briefings held at the White House and lead by the U.S. president Donald Trump. In these briefings and with the help of certain intrinsic and known-to-the public characteristics of the president’s personality such as the love of power, authority and control, appreciation of dictatorship, arrogance, and self-aggrandizing, the media managed to portray the president as a person with modest or even poor communication skills, a bigot, a self-congratulatory, a liar, a self-opinionated, and a self-righteous. Second, it was George Floyd’s murder as a result of the brutality of four white police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota which overtook the nationwide pandemic, the coronavirus. Floyd’s grievous death sparked waves of protests in major cities nationwide, and instead of standing up for his citizen’s rights, Trump turned a blind eye to this heinous crime. Furthermore, Trump failed verbally and nonverbally to address the grieving nation and to show empathy and solidarity with the victim and his family. His words did not match the grave and horrific situation, and his voice tone and his facial expressions failed to pacify the irate public. The media outlets were there to expose Trump’s deadly mishaps and glitches not just to the American public but to the whole world. With the help of the media, American people were able to detect the fallacy of his arguments and claims. These outlets were happy to dedicate hundreds of hours of live coverage in its quest to pave the way for Trump’s demise and fall.

Two North Carolinians, Same Goal, Different Approaches

2019 ◽  
pp. 279-300
Author(s):  
Troy L. Kickler
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
House Of Representatives ◽  
Orange County ◽  
Constitutional Reform ◽  
The Public ◽  
State Senator ◽  
North Carolinians ◽  
The University ◽  
Civil Libertarian ◽  
The U.S

The volume’s final substantive essay compares and contrasts the public careers of two of the most important members of that generation of North Carolina politicians who rose to prominence after the founding era. Archibald D. Murphey was an Orange County judge and state senator who became known as a champion of constitutional reform and state support for education and internal improvements. Nathaniel Macon served 24 years in the U.S. House of Representatives and 13 years in the Senate and acquired a reputation as an archconsevative. This essay suggests traditional accounts may exaggerate their differences. Macon’s opposition to the Sedition Bill of 1798 showed a civil libertarian streak. Both men owned slaves and neither supported any significant steps to end slavery. Both men supported the University of North Carolina. Their differences stemmed in part from the different realms in which they operated. As a member of Congress, Macon felt compelled to address the constitutional limits of federal power, issues which Murphey, as a state politician, did not have to confront.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Lurie
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Terrorist Attacks ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Public Response ◽  
The Public ◽  
War Photography ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
The Media ◽  
The U.S

This book concludes by relating its discussion of visualizing history to the media and the public response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It shows their overly mediated depiction to have a precedent in Civil War photography, and it avers the shared impulse to visualize attending each of these epochal historical events. The Conclusion reads Toni Morrison’s Beloved as offering a salutary “forgetful remembrance” of history in the novel’s model of “rememory” and as an alternative to historicist criticism, as well as to U.S. culture’s visual archiving of a supposedly accessible and remediable past. The discussion also links Morrison’s work to post-9/11 poetry and to contemporary and recent African-American cinema, which, like Beloved, shows the occasion and the need for a willful look forward for both racialized subjects and for the U.S. polity generally in a postdigital age.

scholarly journals Victims’ Rights and the Struggle over Crime in the Media

2007 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Carrie A. Rentschler
Keyword(s):  
Justice System ◽  
Crime Victims ◽  
Crime Victim ◽  
Media Portrayals ◽  
The Public ◽  
Murder Victims ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Journalistic Practice ◽  
The U.S

Abstract: This paper seeks to explain how crime victims have become increasingly visible in the criminal justice system and in media portrayals of crime by looking to the U.S. victims’ rights movement and its strategic mobilization of a particular construction of “crime victim” into the public sphere. Through analysis of the movement’s documentation of its media strategies and new forms of victim-oriented journalistic practice, the paper demonstrates how the movement portrays crime through its construction of crime victims as a class of citizens without rights, through which the families of murder victims become proxy-victims. Résumé : Cet article cherche à expliquer la visibilité croissante des victimes de délits dans le système criminel de justice et dans les représentations de crime dans les médias en observant le mouvement des droits des victimes et sa mobilisation stratégique d’une construction spécifique de la “victime de délits” dans la sphère publique. Par l’analyse de la documentation que possède le mouvement de ses stratégies médiatiques et de nouvelles formes de pratiques journalistiques orientées vers les victimes, l’article démontre comment le mouvement dépeint le crime via une construction des victimes de délits en tant que classe de citoyens sans droits, où les familles des victimes de meurtre peuvent tenir lieu de victimes.

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