‘The legislature is the engine room of democracy’: Constructing ideological worldviews through proximisation strategies in Nigerian Senate debates

This study investigates how legislators utilise proximisation strategies to construct ideological worldviews in Nigerian Senate debates about democratic consolidation and the legitimacy of the legislature. For data, samples were purposively drawn from a 1.9 million-word corpus of Nigerian Senate debates constructed for a broader research and subjected to qualitative discourse analysis. The analysis reveals that legislators’ discursive acts prompt the conceptual organisation of the discourse space such that the activities of the executive are construed to be inimical to democratic consolidation and the legitimacy of the legislature, whereas legislators construe themselves positively as resilient defenders of democracy and the legislative institution. Through proximisation strategies, legislators engage in the ideological discourse of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation relative to the executive. This paper contributes to our understanding of the tenuous and polarised relationship amongst arms of government under a presidential political system in an emerging democracy.

Rule or Ruin

This chapter focuses on the 1860 presidential election and the final rupture of the antebellum Democratic Party. As Stephen Douglas and Jefferson Davis collided in a series of Senate debates over slavery, self-government, and the western territories, their Democratic Party self-destructed in its national convention held in Charleston, South Carolina. Unwilling to accept Douglas as a candidate or popular sovereignty as party doctrine, southern Democrats bolted the convention, nominated John C. Breckinridge for president, and campaigned on a frankly proslavery and anti-majoritarian platform. Northern Democrats rallied behind Douglas and popular sovereignty, completing the party fracture. The election of Abraham Lincoln and subsequent secession crisis pushed Davis and Douglas’s wings of the Democracy even further apart. Douglas denounced secession and urged compromise, while Davis tentatively pivoted toward Mississippi secessionists.

Battles for branding : political marketing and U.S. Senate debates

Televised political debates, as two-sided information flows, are dynamic political communication events that inform, persuade, and entertain voters. Political debates provide candidates the opportunity to brand themselves to voters, and political marketing provides a framework with which to analyze communication effects and how voters process and retain information in memory. Through an analysis of survey responses from participants who viewed a 2018 U.S. Senate debate, the current study incorporates a political marketing perspective to analyze how televised political debates influence voters' brand associations toward candidates. My results led me to develop the concept of Debate Branding, where participating in a debate is more likely to generate positive brand associations with supporters than it is to generate negative brand associations with detractors. Each of the debating candidates in this study saw more positive in-group associations than negative out-group associations, highlighting the power of debates as branding opportunities. Moreover, brand favorability, i.e., how many positive or negative thoughts individuals had toward candidates, was a significant predictor of candidate evaluations. Additionally, respondents offered far more brand associations about the candidates as people than they did about the policy positions or party affiliation of the candidates. This finding contributes to the literature on candidate image and issues in political communication. Debates, as persuasive events, can produce cognitive involvement in voters. Through an experimental design, my study explored how involvement influenced the brand associations of viewers. I found that personal relevance remains a core path to involvement, while also finding tentative, yet intriguing support for a new path to involvement in political messages: nationalized partisan involvement. Cognitive involvement, in the form of brand associations, was highest when a debate was both personally relevant and nationalized. This has implications for the modern political media and electoral environment.Televised political debates are largely studied at the presidential level and there is a corresponding paucity of literature on the effects of viewing Senate debates. I found that viewing a televised U.S. Senate debate promoted information acquisition, had substantive influences on attitudes such as political information efficacy, candidate evaluations, intention to vote for a candidate, and intention to vote in the midterm elections, and had marginal influences on political cynicism and interest. These findings have implications for educators, television programmers, political campaigns, and civic groups across the country. Presidential debates are not the only debates that have positive democratic outcomes.

The Congressional Debate on Partial-Birth Abortion: Constitutional Gravitas and Moral Passion

Automated content analysis is employed to measure the dimensionality of Senate debates on the 2003 Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act and compare these results with the final vote. The underlying verbal conflict leading up to the final roll-call vote contains two important dimensions: (1) an emotive battle over the abortion procedure itself, and (2) the battle over the constitutionality of the bill. Surprisingly, senators appear not to have voted along the first dimension of the verbal conflict, but rather along the second dimension. The analysis of the deliberations of senators not only enables us to understand the complexity of the arguments that is not captured in the vote, but it also uncovers (and measures empirically) the strategies employed by legislators to shape the relevant lines of conflict, and ultimately, the final content of the bill.