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Candidate debates are increasingly organized during elections in democracies and electoral autocracies. How do debates impact partisan divisions and preferences in these contexts? One theoretical perspective suggests that debates should amplify these preferences and divisions, while another implies debates should attenuate them. This paper evaluates these expectations by studying presidential debates organized during Malawi's May 2019 elections. With an experiment and national panel survey, the paper provides evidence consistent with attenuation: debate watchers were substantially more likely to vote across partisan lines (cross-party voting), became more favorable toward out-partisan candidates, and became less favorable toward co-partisans. Suggestive evidence on causal mechanisms shows that these effects were driven by policy persuasion and debates' impact on perceptions of the candidates' policies and qualities. Results advance debates about information processing, campaign effects, and voting behavior in new democracies and electoral autocracies, and have implications for electoral institutions' impact on partisan divisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As inherently confrontational contexts, North American presidential debates compel politicians to engage in image restoration efforts when targeted by a face-threatening act. Since the first televised debates in 1960, presidential campaigns have become increasingly mediatized and the need to defend against face-damage has increased, for there is still a need to uphold a favorable presidential image despite the prominence of impoliteness in these events. Although a longstanding tradition, there is still no framework for the combined analysis of threatening and defensive face-work in presidential debates. This paper presents a corpus-based three-fold analysis blending qualitative, quantitative and statistical methodologies to observe the evolution of facework in this context, focusing on impoliteness and image restoration manifestations. The selected corpus comprises the presidential debates of seven North American elections --one per decade--, providing an overview of the evolution of both phenomena. This methodology also allows insight into the frequency of specific strategies. The analysis adopts a multi-theoretical approach to demonstrate the effectiveness of integrating Impoliteness theory (Culpeper, 1996) and Image restoration theory (Benoit and Wells, 1996) to create a comprehensive new approach to the study of face-work in presidential debates. Supported by results from Pearson's Chi-square test, the combination of these theories was shown to be possible. The recurrence of attack-defense pairings integrating strategies from both theories also pointed to their necessary combination. While the recent incorporation of a female presidential candidate hinted at the potential gender variation of face-work in the debates, further data is needed to obtain conclusive results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates are important events during presidential elections in the U.S.A. Candidates are juxtaposed and engage with each other on a wide range of issues. This poses the question how disagreement between the two candidates and the public is managed. The aim of this paper is to articulate the prototypical argumentative pattern used by candidates which shows that to defend that the public should vote for them, candidates recurringly make three central claims. Specifically, they claim that some political action has to happen, they will do that action if elected, while their opponent will not. This basic argument scheme – which could be referred to as campaign promise argumentation – is further expanded by candidates by responding to six distinct critical questions, resulting in a prototypical argumentative pattern designed to deal with potential criticisms against a bid to become president. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last moments of the highly polarized and contentious 2022 presidential elections campaigns, two final debates took place for the second-round of the election. This paper proposes an analysis of these debates using an iterated game theory perspective, where the debates are sequential decision-making environments, with the candidates' statements being classified as cooperative or defection. Cooperative actions denote constructive dialogue revolving around governmental plans, whereas defection encompasses negative campaigning tactics, including ad hominem attacks and the spread of misleading information. Through an exhaustive analysis of transcriptions from both debates, the candidates' strategic moves are extracted and categorized. The findings offer new insights into the role of strategies in shaping electoral outcomes, emphasizing the nuanced interplay of policy discourse and personal character assessments in a politically charged environment. Additionally, the research underscores the profound implications of such strategies on voter perceptions and decisions, offering a new perspective to the existing literature on political communication and electoral game theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revue Académique des Études Sociales et Humaines is the property of Hassif Benbouali University of Chlef and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

U.S. presidential primary debates are influential but under-researched. Before 2015, all of these debates, both Democratic and Republican, had 10 candidates or fewer. The first Republican debate in 2015, however, abided 17 candidates. They were split into two segments, with the 10 best-polling candidates in the main (prime-time) segment and the others in an 'undercard' session. A comparable pattern applied for the next six Republican debates. Concern arose not only because many candidates were crowded into a session but also because the undercard candidates were seen as receiving inferior exposure. The Democratic presidential primary debates that started four years later encountered similar difficulty. An authorized policy caused their candidates in each of the first two debates to be limited to 20, randomly divided into two groups of 10 appearing on successive nights. For remedy, this paper examines innovative debate plans, for different numbers of candidates, that feature symmetry among all candidates and entail many short segments with relatively few candidates in each. We apply combinatorial designs—balanced incomplete block designs and regular pairwise balanced designs, which are analogous to the games Spot It Jr.! Animals and (full-fledged) Spot It!, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, corpus-based methods for comparing language varieties have fallen into one of two camps: (1) md analysis – a complicated multi-variate approach based on analysis of functionally motivated linguistic features in each text of a corpus, or (2) keyword/key pos analysis – simple, univariate techniques to identify any feature with a statistically skewed distribution in a corpus. In this paper, we introduce a complementary technique – key feature analysis – which is a simple quantitative approach to compare the texts in two varieties with respect to a set of functionally motivated lexico-grammatical features. We introduce the methods of key feature analysis, contrast them with other approaches for comparing text varieties, and present case studies from the domains of online registers and US presidential debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media have become key in political communication, playing a crucial role in election campaigns due to their fast, ubiquitous communication. This paper focuses on the comparison of the use of the social network Twitter in Spanish and French public and commercial television stations, during the last televised debates held during their general elections (2019 and 2022). It seeks to find whether conversation and interaction with their audiences take place, and whether these meet the dialogic principles set forth by Kent and Taylor adapted to Twitter by Ribalko and Seltzer to include usefulness of information, generation of return visits and dialogic loop preservation. To do this, the content of the general Twitter profiles of two French television stations, together with their profiles focused on informative content, were analyzed before, during and after the televised election debate held on 20 April. Likewise, the Twitter profiles corresponding to two Spanish television stations, together with the profiles corresponding to their news programs, were studied before, during and after the televised election debates held on 22 and 23 April. After screening all their posts, those referring to the debate and generating the largest engagement figures were selected, in order to compare the topics covered in the televised debates with those covered in Twitter. The results reveal that the information-focused accounts originate more posts whose content is linked to the televised debates, in contrast with the general accounts. Furthermore, both the unidirectionality of their content, and the lack of dialogue and interaction between these accounts and their audiences, become apparent, in addition to the minimal occurrence of "debate about the debate" flow among users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blame attribution research suggests partisans acknowledge evidence that portrays copartisans negatively but blame externalities for negative events. This study identifies another blame attribution pattern. When people observe unfair/dishonest behavior by a copartisan, instead of shifting blame entirely to others, they engage in blame-spreading. I conduct two tests: a survey of undergraduate students who watched part of a 2020 Presidential debate and a survey experiment of a random sample of adults that randomizes the party affiliation of the debate participant engaging in unfair/dishonest behavior. When the unfair actor is a copartisan, people blame both participants equally. When the unfair actor is in the out-party, people blame the out-party actor. These findings suggest individuals acknowledge undesirable behavior among copartisans, but seek to justify it by identifying blame-worthy behavior by others, thus providing an additional mechanism in motivated reasoning whereby individuals acknowledge events while finding a way to justify such behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Seqüência is the property of Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Programa de Pos-Graduacao Stricto Sensu em Direito and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Spanish in Context is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Res Rhetorica is the property of Polish Rhetoric Society and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In televised election debates, politicians confront each other side-by-side to publicly debate their political viewpoints. As a result, these debates have the potential to promote reflective reasoning in citizens. However, concerns are voiced regularly about politicians' increasing use of one-liners, slogans, and empty phrases, and decreasing use of elaborate and thoughtful argumentation, which may lower the debates' reflection-promoting potential. Despite concerns, systematic empirical evidence testing whether reflection-promoting speech is declining is extremely scarce. This study contributes to filling this gap by (1) identifying four reflection-promoting speech components, that is, provision of justifications, substantive information, accessible communication, and engagement with others' perspectives and (2) conducting a longitudinal quantitative content analysis (1985–2019) of Belgian election debates through the lens of their reflection-promoting potential. The results of all studied speech components point in the same direction: reflection-promoting speech in election debates has not declined, showing that allegations surrounding debates should be considered with caution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When and how do the American political elites react discursively to China as a rising power? Do they depict it as an economic or military risk? What role do discursive references to China play in the US populist discourses? Relying on the thematic and critical discourse analysis of all the American presidential debates, this article explores the way US politicians portray China throughout three eras marked by distinct global power configurations. Several types of discourses have been identified. In contrast to the belligerent rhetoric of the early Cold War, when China was framed as a major military threat, after 2004, presidential candidates started referring to Beijing as an economic rival. By 2008, the emerging bipartisan consensus centered on China as mainly a trade competitor. By contrast, populist narratives in 2016 and 2020 stood out because they included emotional appeals and inflated the risks of the Sino-American rivalry to mobilize voters. In doing so, the populists sought to forge coalitions in favor of protectionist policies among those voters, who were employed in manufacturing sectors facing growing international competition. The anti-China mentions reached a peak during the 2020 debates amidst the pandemic when the populist candidate used biased language, relying on tropes resembling the 19th century racist "yellow peril" rhetoric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has shown that presidential debates have "minimal effects" on aggregate electoral preferences because they mainly reinforce people's pre-existing political preferences. However, most of what we know about the behavioural effects of debates comes from research conducted in the United States and other institutionalised democracies. We re-evaluate the effects of debates on electoral preferences by focusing on Latin American elections. Given higher levels of electoral volatility, weaker partisan brands, lower partisanship, and more personalised voter linkages, we expect that debates play a significant role in shaping vote choice in Latin America. We test these expectations by conducting an analysis of presidential debates on aggregated vote preferences in thirty-two elections across fourteen Latin American countries from 2002 to 2019. Our results show that presidential debates shape electoral preferences in countries with weakly institutionalised party systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Correspondencias & Analisis is the property of Universidad de San Martin de Porres and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Since presidential primary debates in US election campaigns serve the function of identifying the most promising nominee for the subsequent presidency, they constitute a highly adversarial multilogue. Debaters do not only exchange factual arguments but also use diverse forms of impoliteness geared towards damaging the public image of political opponents and persuading audiences to vote accordingly. Combining political discourse analysis with pragmatic approaches to impoliteness, this paper examines the ways in which verbal aggression in debates inflicts damage on the addressee's positive and negative face. On the basis of five Democratic and five Republican debates from 2016, it is shown that impolite utterances fulfil the four central strategic functions of (a) delegitimization, (b) coercion, (c) entertainment, and (d) (self-)defence, all of which support the macro-function of political persuasion through the construction of personal preferability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Human Sciences (19922876) is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The special issue comprises a selection of papers presented at the "Textual Identities through Translation" symposium, organized by the Department of English Language and Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, in February 22-23, 2019, where rendition of im/politeness was a subtheme. This is especially the case with translation practice, where translation practitioners may need to adjust im/politeness strategies to meet target audience expectations and enhance the communicative dynamics of discourse. In stage translation, the appeal of a translated performance to a target audience may depend on how translation practitioners may have transferred im/politeness strategies in a target version. To this end, the study makes use of [3] positive/negative politeness strategies to examine the use of im/politeness strategies in two Greek versions of William Shakespeare's play I Julius Caesar i . [Extracted from the article]

Previous studies have introduced various approaches for visualizing the spatial and temporal distributions of sentiments expressed on social media. However, many existing methods either overlook the evolving nature of sentiments or fail to account for the spatial distribution of sentiment trends related to specific topics. To gain a comprehensive understanding of how sentiments evolve in relation to topics and geographies, it is essential to capture the dynamic nature of sentiment through time series analysis and geovisualization. This article introduces a workflow that combines natural language processing, spatial time series analysis, and geovisualization techniques to identify and visualize the variations in sentiment trends on Twitter across different geographic regions and topics. By examining the 2016 presidential debates as a case study, we uncover distinct temporal patterns in sentiment distributions across various topics and states. Our findings also show that adjacent states do not always share similar sentiment trends, and that geographic clusters with similar sentiment trends also vary across topics. Failing to consider these variations may result in misunderstanding public discourse and sentiments since they are diverse and dynamic in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article proposes a dialogic approach to ridiculing in the French presidential debate of 2022, illustrating the ridiculing act as representative of the core dynamics of political debates. The analysis enabled the configuration of a prototype of the ridiculing act within a dialogic sequence of action and reaction, which shows that ridiculing most frequently occurs as an immediate reaction or reactive chain to actions initiated in the free discussion sections of the dialogue. The selected dialogic sequences are shaped by some particularities of ridiculing as a macro speech act of negative humour and the genre of the presidential debate, such as the interplay of the different layers of meaning, as well as the fixed rules of turn-taking, the front-staged nature of the talk and the participation framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The final presidential debate in the U.S. was one of the most widely followed programs of 2016. The main broadcasters aired it live on television and streamed it through social media with closed captioning so that all Americans could access this highly awaited political event. After the debate night, most networks uploaded the full program or fragments of it to their websites in order to make it available to viewers who had missed the original transmission. This paper focuses on the closed captioning provided in the videos of the final debate available on the websites and YouTube channels of the most prominent networks that televised the event. Drawing on literature from Media Accessibility, Communication and Internet Studies, an analysis of the availability and functionality of the online captions in those clips was performed, which proved that the accessibility services offered after the debate night to audiences with hearing loss could be substantially improved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is both an artist statement and a case study focusing on the surprising viewership of a video I created in 2020 unexpectedly became popular in April 2021. In the course of this reflection and analysis, I show how the meaning of this video involves the algorithms driving the YouTube platform, and the various and painful contexts of the year 2020. Although I view the video as a successful piece of art in its own way, I also argue that, as a meme, it must also be viewed with reference to its three salient contexts: the deformative meme ecology, YouTube as a platform, and the year 2020. Because the memetic logics demonstrated by my video bring together the participatory logics of appropriation with the capricious attention of the YouTube algorithm, my access to the videos' audience analytics affords a unique perspective on the memetics of resonance and spread. Ultimately, a close analysis of this video will shed light on the ecology of video memes on YouTube, the recommendation algorithm as an audience, and the way that those two structures come into view through the analytics data to offer insight on viewers' responses that not typically available to artists. Ultimately, I conclude that the qualities of media encouraged by the analytics dashboard's emphasis on engagement are not necessarily consistent with the goals of critical media art, but it is possible to consider how further attention to metrics could create compelling art with attention to algorithmic affordances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concerns are frequently raised about politicians' increasing use of incivility. Yet, there is little longitudinal empirical work testing whether politicians' use of incivility is actually rising, and little is known about the determinants that affect the prevalence of incivility. This study analyzes incivility over time and proposes a multi-layered framework of theoretically-driven incivility-inducing determinants. A quantitative content analysis of 4,102 speech acts in 24 Belgian televised election debates over the course of 35 years (1985–2019) shows that politicians' incivility did not increase but occurs in a volatile pattern with ups and downs over the years. Confirmed by our analysis of the studied determinants, incivility shows to be highly context-specific. Particularly, incivility levels are affected both by characteristics of politicians, such as populism, incumbency, and gender, and by debate determinants, such as the topic under discussion, the number of politicians simultaneously debating each other, and previous incivility occurrences in the debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Argument schemes are abstractions substantiating the inferential connection between premise(s) and conclusion in argumentative communication. Identifying such conventional patterns of reasoning is essential to the interpretation and evaluation of argumentation. Whether studying argumentation from a theory-driven or data-driven perspective, insight into the actual use of argumentation in communicative practice is essential. Large and reliably annotated corpora of argumentative discourse to quantitatively provide such insight are few and far between. This is all the more true for argument scheme corpora, which tend to suffer from a combination of limited size, poor validation, and the use of ad hoc restricted typologies. In the current paper, we describe the annotation of schemes on the basis of two distinct classifications: Walton's taxonomy of argument schemes, and Wagemans' Periodic Table of Arguments. We describe the annotation procedure for each, and the quantitative characteristics of the resulting annotated text corpora. In doing so, we extend the annotation of the preexisting US2016 corpus of televised election debates, resulting in, to the best of our knowledge, the two largest consistently annotated corpora of schemes in argumentative dialogue publicly available. Based on evaluation in terms of inter-annotator agreement, we propose further improvements to the guidelines for annotating schemes: the argument scheme key, and the Argument Type Identification Procedure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Politicas y Sociales is the property of Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Politicas y Sociales and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper presents an analysis of several sequences of talk-in-interaction, highlighting the ironic and sarcastic references made by candidates to the US presidential elections in the debates of 2016 and 2020. The participation framework of the two events (one same male candidate - Donald Trump - in subsequent election debates, first with a female opponent - Hillary Clinton, then with a male - Joe Biden) offers an interesting perspective on how "the gender thing" is manifested in speech. Despite the almost gender-blind character reached by the genre of the preelection debate as discourse-in-interaction, the analysis addresses the relevance of the speaker's gender in significant moments of talk, particularly focusing on protagonists' lexical choices to refer to the other in an ironic and sarcastic way. Trying to fill the is-ought to gap in the minds of the audience, candidates to presidency make sophisticated use of words in debates. In their permanent effort to disqualify the opponent while seducing the people, irony and sarcasm are effective weapons in the battles of words that these events are without exception turned into. The analysis considers the normative component of Political Discourse Analysis, as presented by Fairclough & Fairclough (2012, 2015), as well as the perspective on investigating verbal irony and sarcasm, as presented in Gibbs & Colston (2017) and the formulae for interpreting categories of humour, elaborated by Patrick Charaudeau (2011, 2013). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper illustrates the use of the brand components in the most important campaign debate of the presidential elections in Romania in 2014: the first televised election confrontation between the candidates (Victor Ponta and Klaus Iohannis) in the second round of the presidential election. The research method of case study was selected. The research technique consisted of the content analysis of the two speeches. Finding the elements of the candidate's brand in a single confrontation implies, even more so, his presence in the entire election campaign. Six of the eight components of the brand (adaptability, differentiation, innovation, history, positioning, and segmentation) are used by both candidates with the purpose to influence citizens’ vote. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Trabalhos em Lingüística Aplicada is the property of Universidade Estadual de Campinas - Portal de Periodicos Eletronicos Cientificos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Political endorsements are becoming common in African elections. Endorsements by chiefs in Ghana's 2016 presidential election re-ignited debates on chiefs' involvement in partisan politics. But, (how) did the outcome of the election reflect chiefly endorsements? This article examines the relationship between chiefly political endorsements and election outcome. Data is extracted from online archives of select media outlets and Ghana's Electoral Commission; the analysis is framed in the duality of the postcolonial (African) state. Findings show a complex relationship across levels. The article argues that chiefly political endorsement is unnecessary and undercuts royal agency in community and national development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores how Presidential candidates compete for Twitter attention during a televised debate using two datasets of tweets posted during the first 2012 and 2016 U.S. Presidential debates. Using a time series analysis, we find that both debates exhibited zero-sum attention dynamics such that when one candidate gained attention, the other lost attention. However, our error correction models also revealed that the attention dynamics of Romney and Obama in 2012 produced an equilibrium that neither candidate could break from, whereas in 2016, Twitter attention to Trump overwhelmed Clinton. We therefore conclude that social media attention competition in during the 2012 U.S. presidential debate was more tightly contested compared to 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the nexus between political discourse and contemporary concerns about the arbitration of truth to argue that Trump's way of using speech about speech (i.e., his metapragmatic discourse) resembles the manipulation tactic commonly called gaslighting. Based on examples drawn from 2020 (i.e., White House press conferences and electoral presidential debates), I explore Trump's metapragmatic gaslighting both as an epistemic tactic for the manipulation of information and as an effective style of political self-presentation. By analyzing specific instances of Trump's metapragmatic commentaries that blatantly contradict shared pragmatic principles for the interpretation of utterances' illocutionary force and denotational content, I show how Trump is able to present himself as a champion of semantic and moral candor and simultaneously promote a highly personalist view of the meaning-making process. In so doing, I also propose a metapragmatic approach to the epistemological and political predicaments posed by the "post-truth" epistemic regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Viewers often use social media platforms like Twitter to express their views about televised programs and events like the presidential debate, the Oscars, and the State of the Union speech. Although this promises tremendous opportunities to analyze the feedback on a program or an event using viewer-generated content on social media, there are significant technical challenges to doing so. Specifically, given a televised event and related tweets about this event, we need methods to effectively align these tweets and the corresponding event. In turn, this will raise many questions, such as how to segment the event and how to classify a tweet based on whether it is generally about the entire event or specifically about one particular event segment. In this paper, we propose and develop a novel joint Bayesian model that aligns an event and its related tweets based on the influence of the event's topics. Our model allows the automated event segmentation and tweet classification concurrently. We present an efficient inference method for this model and a comprehensive evaluation of its effectiveness compared with the state-of-the-art methods. We find that the topics, segments, and alignment provided by our model are significantly more accurate and robust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This corpus-assisted discourse study investigates diachronic change in a specialised corpus of seventeen American presidential debates from 2000 to 2020. The texts were tagged using the ucrel Semantic Annotation System (usas) (Rayson, 2008) to facilitate the investigation of emergent and decreasing semantic trends over the period; the strength of trends was empirically evaluated through application of Kendall's Tau correlation coefficient. The analysis revealed that domains reflecting truth evaluations and matters of credibility increased alongside a more people-orientated discourse, as evidenced by increases in personal pronouns. Furthermore, instances invoking warfare and defence decreased, paralleled by a decrease in the representations of toughness. These results may reflect a shift in US political discourse generally, and American presidential discourse specifically, while also reflecting evolving contemporary social and political interests over the twenty-year span of the corpus. This study concludes with interpretations of these discursive shifts in the context of the current era of so-called 'fake news', intense partisanship, and social and political divisiveness. Findings indicate that the current US political climate cannot simply be attributed to an anomalous Trump administration but, rather, the discursive features contributing to and reflecting the current political environment have been present and increasing since at least the year 2000 election cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Hebrew Bible and other ancient Near Eastern texts describe Egyptian, Aramean, Assyrian, and Babylonian military campaigns to the Southern Levant during the 10th to sixth centuries BCE. Indeed, many destruction layers dated to this period have been unearthed in archaeological excavations. Several of these layers are securely linked to specific campaigns and are widely accepted as chronological anchors. However, the dating of many other destruction layers is often debated, challenging the ability to accurately reconstruct the different military campaigns and raising questions regarding the historicity of the biblical narrative. Here, we present a synchronization of the historically dated chronological anchors and other destruction layers and artifacts using the direction and/or intensity of the ancient geomagnetic field recorded in mud bricks from 20 burnt destruction layers and in two ceramic assemblages. During the period in question, the geomagnetic field in this region was extremely anomalous with rapid changes and high-intensity values, including spikes of more than twice the intensity of today's field. The data are useful in the effort to pinpoint these short-term variations on the timescale, and they resolve chronological debates regarding the campaigns against the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, the relationship between the two kingdoms, and their administrations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Article 1 of the Indian Constitution defines India as a 'Union ofStates1 but the structure of governance is federal. The trajectory of federal structure is asymmetric in nature and the asymmetric federal tendencies reflect in different ways under part XXI, Fifth, and Sixth Schedule of the Constitution. Part XXI of the Constitution provides special status to Jammu and Kashmir State under Article 370. Article 371 of the Indian Constitution gives special status to Gujarat and Maharashtra and Article 371(A) to 371(J) provide special provisions to North-Eastern and other Indian states. However, this paper is an attempt to understand and contextualize the nature and debate on Indian federalism along with its asymmetric character, especially in J&K. After 2014 elections debates and discussions surfaced over Article 370 and Article 35-A. The paper will also explore that why the objective of asymmetrical federalism is far from what actually expected by the framers ofthe Indian Constitution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the structure of party competition evolves slowly, crisis-like events can induce short-term change to the political agenda. This may be facilitated by challenger parties who might benefit from increased attention to issues they own. We study the dynamic of such shifts through mainstream parties' response to the 2015 refugee crisis, which strongly affected public debate and election outcomes across Europe. Specifically, we analyse how parties changed their issue emphasis and positions regarding immigration before, during, and after the refugee crisis. Our study is based on a corpus of 120,000 press releases between 2013 and 2017 from Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. We identify immigration-related press releases using a novel dictionary and estimate party positions. The resulting monthly salience and positions measures allow for studying changes in close time-intervals, providing crucial detail for disentangling the impact of the crisis itself and the contribution of right-wing parties. While we provide evidence that attention to immigration increased drastically for all parties during the crisis, radical right parties drove the attention of mainstream parties. However, the attention of mainstream parties to immigration decreased toward the end of the refugee crisis and there is limited evidence of parties accommodating the positions of the radical right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research hypothesizes that the American 2020 Presidential debate participants used recurrent interruptions as a communicative strategy to gain more power on the debate floor and win the voters' support. The form of political interaction (televised debates) also affected the candidates' speech behavior in a way that it added another participant (the general public) to the discussion; as a result, an institutionally controlled form of political discourse was subjected to a medial turn. This kind of media influence contributed to the speakers' choice of specific interruption types during the debates. The research analyses the turn-taking strategies of D. Trump and J. Biden employed in the First and Second (and Final) Debates and matches them with the pre- and post-debate poll results. The article concludes that although having a certain impact on the perception of the politicians' personalities, the effect of interruptions as a debate strategy on the voters' final choices was marginal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The personal characteristics of political elites play an important role in British elections. While the personalization of the media’s election coverage has been the subject of much debate, we know less about the conditions under which voters receive personalized messages directly from elites during the campaign. In this paper, we use a new dataset that includes more than 3300 local communications from the 2015 general election to explore variation in the personalization of campaign messaging. We find that there is systemic variation in terms of where photographs of party leaders are included in election communications, which provides further evidence that campaign messages are deployed strategically to portray the candidate - and their party - in the best possible light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Universitas, Revista de Ciencias Sociales y Humanas is the property of Universidad Politecnica Salesiana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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Debates about electoral reform revolve around giving voters more choice. Consequently, reformers often favor adopting the single transferable vote, a candidate-based system that allows voters to rank order candidates. Nonetheless, studies about whether lower preferences (transfers) influence STV election outcomes remain scant. To address this gap, our comparative multivariate approach tests transfers' impact on election results in Ireland, Malta, Northern Ireland, and Scotland. We find that, on average, transfers are pivotal in the election of about one in 10 elected candidates. Hence, their impact is the exception rather than the norm. We show that when lower preferences are decisive at the candidate level, they benefit smaller and moderate parties and non-incumbents and, in Malta and Ireland, female candidates. Our results have implications for understanding the extent to which multiple preferences influence election outcomes and for debates on electoral reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims at investigating linguistically from a pragmatic perspective the (im)politeness of political fallacies of the 2020 US presidential campaign debates. There is relatively little literature that tackles the relation between (im)politeness and political fallacies. This study tries to fill in that gap and shed light on these linguistic concepts in accordance with particular pragmatic theories. Two main pragmatic theories are used to analyse these data: Van Eemeren, and Henkemans' (2017) Pragma-dialectical Theory of Fallacy, and Culpeper's (1996, 2005) Theory of Impoliteness, in addition to Brown and Levinson's views of politeness. The data are extracted from the first and the second (final) US presidential debates between Trump and Biden. They are analyzed in detail to find out the fallacies committed by the politicians and to determine whether they are committed politely or impolitely. This study ends with some conclusions that show the politicians' language has a considerable number of fallacies, and the fallacious arguments or fallacious standpoints committed by them are kinds of impolite fallacies, committed intentionally to impose their authority and power upon their opponents. Nevertheless, some other fallacies are committed in a polite way especially when addressing the audience to gain their approval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research applies Foucault's framework of parrhesia or "truth-telling" to analyze the twelve Republican Party's Presidential debates in 2015–2016, culminating in the nomination of Donald Trump as the party's Presidential candidate. Using discourse and conversation analytical methods, it explores how the three main debate competitors constructed three different narratives of truth: Donald Trump's "parrhesiastic truth;" Marco Rubio's "orthodox truth;" and Ted Cruz's "ironic truth" produced by combining features of the former two. Key findings of this research are that different narratives of truth compete during political elections, and that their public resonance, or lack thereof, is historically contingent, based on shifting public attitudes towards institutional power. Politicians such as Ted Cruz who attempt to emulate parrhesia risk fracturing their personal and political voices, resulting in incoherence and silence on the public stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the dramatic voter turnout increase in 2019, the participation level in European Parliament elections is still considerably lower than in national elections. How can we explain this persistent 'Euro gap'? This article analyses the motivations of citizens who participate in national but not in European electoral contests, the so-called 'EU-only abstainers'. The empirical analysis based on the EES 2019 voter study reveals that EU-only abstention is driven by low levels of general political interest and EU-specific political sophistication, as well as by distrust towards EU institutions. Therefore, the Euro gap results from the widespread perception that there is 'less at stake' during EP elections, but it is also an aggregate-level consequence of individual Eurosceptic attitudes. These findings have important implications for our understanding of present-day European elections and the debate between the two most common theoretical approaches in EP election research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study is a critical discourse analysis of the various themes presented in Trump's and Clinton's Second Presidential Debate 2016. It also investigates the various strategies used by the candidates to gain support from their fellow Americans. Controlling manipulative and dehumanising discourse, as well as situational rhetoric and more refined conversational strategies such as using "us" as a positive representation and "them" as a negative representation, are all components of effective communication. The metaphorical structures are used to bolster anti-immigrant and fearful sentiments, as well as to strip people of their humanity in order to make them unworthy of self-esteem. Critical discourse analysis examines not only the linguistic elements of discourse but also the context in which it is delivered. The results show that the candidates help to replicate idea manipulation by emphasising positive selfrepresentation of "us" and negative other presentations of "them" as a form of audience mind control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indonesian political thinking is divided in two: political Islam and secular politics. Soekarno and Mohammad Natsir were dominant political figures in Indonesia, with the former being a secular nationalist, and the latter being an Islamist. Both these leaders inherited ideological disparities, and these distinctions separate political Islam from secular nationalism. This presents an academic opportunity, because such a phenomenon can act as material for research to invent and develop new ideas. This study took a qualitative approach and used both primary and secondary data sources, and a collection of publications and documents were examined to inform this research. The primary and secondary data were therefore analyzed qualitatively to construct a theory. Due to the national arguments during the early years of independence, both Islamic and secular nationalist ideologies emerged. Soekarno and Muhammad Yamin's version of Pancasila (the Five Basic Principles) was advocated as the national principle by the nationalist circle. This ideological issue has been debated since the presidential decree legalized the Jakarta Charter, which established an ideal constitutional vision for the country and state. As a result, the Jakarta Charter was implemented in law as part of the 1945 Constitution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of journalism is experiencing intense diversification in form and message while trying to overcome widespread public disaffection by reinforcing professional norms. This study focuses on two forces—normalization and fragmentation—by observing them at work on social media. We analyzed content and interactions from mainstream and non-mainstream political journalists covering a 2016 U.S. presidential debate. Forces of normalization would draw these two groups of reporters together in a monolithic, widespread practice, perhaps including both newer and older methods. Forces of fragmentation, on the other hand, would drive groups of practitioners further apart, with clearer lines separating mainstream journalism from its offshoots. The key question is where these similarities and differences between mainstream and non-mainstream journalists arise. Findings suggest divergence in objectivity and gatekeeping, and convergence in campaign coverage practices. The evidence suggests that, on Twitter, mainstream reporters insulate themselves by interacting mainly with other journalists, while non-mainstream journalists offer openly partisan interpretations and seek out audience participation and engagement, often from people sharing their viewpoints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study is a critical discourse analysis of the various themes presented in Trump's and Clinton's Second Presidential Debate 2016. It also investigates the various strategies used by the candidates to gain support from their fellow Americans. Controlling manipulative and dehumanising discourse, as well as situational rhetoric and more refined conversational strategies such as using "us" as a positive representation and "them" as a negative representation, are all components of effective communication. The metaphorical structures are used to bolster anti-immigrant and fearful sentiments, as well as to strip people of their humanity in order to make them unworthy of self-esteem. Critical discourse analysis examines not only the linguistic elements of discourse but also the context in which it is delivered. The results show that the candidates help to replicate idea manipulation by emphasising positive selfrepresentation of "us" and negative other presentations of "them" as a form of audience mind control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]