STAYING IN THEIR LANES: ISSUE OWNERSHIP IN THE 2016 AND 2020 U.S. PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS ON FACEBOOK AND TWITTER

Prior research has identified issue-ownership across partisan lines, with Republicans seen to focus on issues such as taxes and national defense, and Democrats more likely to focus on social issues and welfare. Given the complexities of the primary race, with candidates aiming to differentiate themselves within their own party, we ask whether the candidates in both parties engage in creating “lanes” by owning specific policy topics. Use supervised machine-learning and a lexicon approach to classify candidate posts on twelve different political topics, we analyze Facebook and Twitter messages from 17 Republicans and 19 Democrats during the 2016 and 2020 U.S. Presidential Elections. We find that Democrats are more likely to post about the issues on social media, and Republicans and Democrats talk about significantly different topics. We also find that candidates of both parties tended to advocate for the issues they cared about, rather than attack opponents on issues.

One-Eyed King: Phenomenon of “Positive Program” in Russian Politics

One of the central issues of the Russian politics is whether its participants have the so-called “positive program”, and the representatives of both the ruling regime and opposition regularly talk about the need for such program. The article examines three interrelated issues: 1) what a “positive program” means and how this phenomenon is interpreted in the Russian political space; 2) to what extent it is correct to accuse Russian parties in their lack of a “positive program”; 3) whether the current government, which articulates the demand for a positive program more often than others, has such a program. In this article the author shows that, being a specifically Russian phenomenon, a “positive program” today presupposes not only the advancement of concrete proposals and initiatives that look into the future and represent an alternative to the current political course. Its most important feature is the acceptance of the status quo: in order for the initiatives of an individual politician or a party to be recognized as “positive”, they should not infringe on the legitimacy of the existing order. It is this criterion alone, according to which the programs of a number of parties can be deemed “non-positive”. In terms of their concrete, alternative and future-oriented programs, many parties are not inferior, if not superior, to the United Russia that largely devotes its party program to the chronicle of the achievements made by the country (not the party) as well as to Vladimir Putin who did not offer to the public a single document called “program” in any of his presidential campaigns.

New Data Sources and Presidential Campaigns

Social media has an undeniable role in presidential campaigns. Starting with Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign in 2008, on one hand, scholars and practitioners have embraced the potential and importance of these platforms. The 2016 presidential elections, on the other hand, raised concerns about social media’s role in democratic processes as debates about how the platforms can sow misinformation have become mainstream. I argue that there has been a positive outcome of such debates: new data sources. Understanding their role—and their probable potential to do “harm”—social media platforms have worked toward increasing transparency in the political advertisements they carry. From Snapchat to Facebook, transparency reports share detailed information on how political groups, including presidential nominees, have utilized their platforms, targeted audiences, and disseminated calls-to-action. In this article, I argue that these transparency attempts will be invaluable data resources for political communication scholars to better explain how voter choice and candidate positioning work within digital media ecology. I answer four sample research questions about 2020 Presidential Elections in the United States to demonstrate the potential of these data sets in shedding light on how issues, identities, and time-relevant variables change political advertising in presidential campaigns.

Digital Caudillos: The Use of Social Media in Guatemalan Presidential Campaigns

This article contributes to the scholarship on Latin American campaigning by presenting data on the use of social media by presidential candidates in Guatemala’s 2019 election, including a content analysis of more than 2,000 Facebook posts along fifteen variables. The data show that Facebook use by presidential campaigns is ubiquitous and allows campaigns to disseminate messages in non-traditional formats. Candidates use their Facebook accounts to mention issues of concern to voters and to make promises to fix the country’s problems, but offer far more slogans and vague promises than detailed policy proposals. They also rarely attack other candidates or tout their own qualifications for the presidency. The data also reveal systematic differences in campaign messaging between frontrunner and long-shot candidates.

Why Trump Lost and How? A Rhetorical Explanation

Discovering why the 2020 election turned out as it did will, given the complexities of American politics, take considerable time. Discovering how Trump lost and how Biden won will take longer. This article presents an initial foray in the latter direction by subjecting the rhetoric of the campaign to computerized language analysis via the DICTION program. In doing so, this study is the most recent outgrowth of the Campaign Mapping Project, begun at the University of Texas in Austin in 1995 and designed to produce comparative rhetorical data about presidential campaigns from 1948 to the present. The argument being made here is that Donald Trump lost the election by making excessive use of what Richard Hofstadter calls the Paranoid Style. In addition, Trump made exaggerated claims about abstract and unprovable conspiracies, all of which seemed derivative to voters worried about their health and their jobs in 2020. Joe Biden, in contrast, stressed Commonality—the need for shared purpose during a dangerous and dispiriting time. Biden also spoke directly of and to the people, thereby taking a page out of Trump’s own 2016 playbook. In many ways, Donald Trump’s self-preoccupations made him blind to the needs of the electorate, a habit that developed over the course of his presidency and that ultimately cost him his job.