Research note: Lies and presidential debates: How political misinformation spread across media streams during the 2020 election

When U.S. presidential candidates misrepresent the facts, their claims get discussed across media streams, creating a lasting public impression. We show this through a public performance: the 2020 presidential debates. For every five newspaper articles related to the presidential candidates, President Donald J. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr., there was one mention of a misinformation-related topic advanced during the debates. Personal attacks on Biden and election integrity were the most prevalent topics across social media, newspapers, and TV. These two topics also surfaced regularly in voters’ recollections of the candidates, suggesting their impression lasted through the presidential election.

Stage Left and Right: Modeling Civil Discourse in the Classroom Through Fictional Presidential Debates Between FDR and Reagan

Franklin Roosevelt—the arch liberal president of the twentieth century—and Ronald Reagan—the face of modern conservatism—remain two of the most influential presidents in American politics. Both impacted policy and politics for decades and in ways that continue to reverberate today. In an attempt to examine the influence of FDR and Reagan in ways that are accessible to our students, we twice taught a class titled FDR and Reagan: What the Greatest Presidential Debate in History Can Teach Us About American Politics ... and How We Can All Get Along. This class asked students to perform fictional presidential debates between the two presidents on foreign, economic, and social policies. The emphasis on role-playing and debate allowed students to conduct deep background research while also encouraging them to inhabit the character of each president. Thus, they were able to immerse themselves in each one’s vision for the nation. Most importantly, this method allowed them to explore how it is both possible and necessary to have rational and respectful political discourse: FDR and Reagan came from opposite ends of the political spectrum and yet, by the end of the course, our students could appreciate that they were both transformative and effective leaders. Both were great communicators able to articulate their visions for the United States. Exploring the meanings of liberalism and conservatism through these methods encouraged greater empathy for opposing political viewpoints in our students. By analyzing the methods and outcomes of our course in this paper, we hope that history teachers might consider similar models to help our students bridge the current political divides which afflict the nation.

Partisan Identity and Affective Polarization in Presidential Debates

This study presents the results of a quasi-experiment to assess the effects of viewing the live televised general election presidential and vice-presidential campaign debates. We contribute to a growing empirical record on the polarizing effects of campaign debates by testing some contextual variables that have confounded past researchers. Specifically, we use Trump’s aggressive first debate performance as a test-case of polarizing content and compare it with Trump’s second debate performance along with the other 2020 debates. We also test whether, as some have hypothesized, vice-presidential debates are more polarizing. Finally, we consider Biden—a candidate who has been polarizing and depolarizing in his vice-presidential debates, as a candidate-specific source of uncertainty in existing findings. We find further evidence that campaign debates increase ingroup affection—or the extent to which co-partisans reward the ingroup candidate. Conversely, outgroup hostility did not increase even after Trump’s first debate. We conclude that debates may contribute to polarization, but only through ingroup affection, not outgroup animosity.

Application of Functional Theory of Political Discourse in Chilean presidential debates to determine the influence of journalists in the contents

Within the growing academic interest over electoral debates, the role of the journalists who conduct the debates in determining the tenor of the answers has not been sufficiently studied. We used Chile as an extreme case, given the predominant role that the debate moderators receive here, thanks to the “journalistic panel” format utilized in them, where they take turns to interview the candidates. As a framework to describe these contents, we used Functional Theory of Political Discourse by William Benoit. Our data show that, indeed, the candidates use different combinations of said functions, depending on the different frameworks established by the rules for each debate. Clearly, the candidates tend to defend themselves from the attacks of the journalists, rather than their rivals’; and they use other strategies when the rules allow them more freedom.

Are American Presidents Becoming Less Rhetorically Complex? Evaluating the Integrative Complexity of Joe Biden and Donald Trump in Historical Context

Are American political leaders becoming simpler in their rhetoric? To evaluate, in the present study we place the two most recent U.S. presidents’ integrative complexity against a historical context for three different types of comparable materials: Presidential Debates, Inaugural Addresses, and State of the Union (SOTU) speeches. Results overwhelmingly suggest that both Joe Biden and Donald Trump are historically simple when compared to the typical president, and that is true both across parties and within their own political party. Further, segmented regression analyses suggest that part of the reason for Biden’s and Trump’s low complexity is the continuation of an ongoing historical decline in complexity among Presidents that began in 1960. However, each president uniquely defies this trend on one material type: Biden is a historical outlier for his low-complexity debates, and Trump is a historical outlier for his low-complexity inauguration speech. Taken as a whole, these data suggest that although American presidents have been declining in complexity, both Biden and Trump are nonetheless uniquely low in complexity in some ways – possibly for reasons that are different for each president.