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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]

Presents a study that analyzed the strategies in specific debates and trans-campaign effects of debates. Contextual elements that influence debate; Factor that often overpowers candidate discourse; Impact of post-debate news coverage on debate viewers.

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.)

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]

Focuses on the campaign against the white paper related to patient care in the National Health Service in Great Britain. Debate on the proposals by the British Medical Association council; Discussions on the letter from the chief medical officer; Implications of the white paper to professional awareness.

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]

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]

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.)

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]

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 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 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]

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]

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.)

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]

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 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]

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.)

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]

This paper analyzes the evolution of TV coverage of presidential campaigns in Romania, concentrating on formats, visual approaches and turning points of the televised final debates between candidates in the second round. These final debates (except for 2000 when it did not take place, as Ion Iliescu refused to face Corneliu Vadim Tudor), had a major influence, along with well chosen moves or historic blunders, on the outcome of the presidential elections in Romania. The paper focuses on the fact that many of the decisions taken by political leaders are today tributary to the way media will comment on them. Relation between media and politics is, undoubtedly, an important factor in understanding the stakes of contemporary democracy. In the long run, television turns presidential elections into a talent show, with all its elements: Settings, story, suspense, show, characters, surprise moves and, more than the multi-million shows, a big and real stake for the viewer. The analysis was made on video recordings of final presidential debates in 1990, 1992, 1996, 2004, 2009 and 2014. For the elections of 1990, 1992, 1996 and 2004 recordings available in archives were studied. For 2009 and 2014, the author personally recorded the debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over time, people have been losing interest in politics. Some believe this to be one of the largest challenges facing democracy today. What causes some citizens to be more engaged than others? This paper argues that national-level political institutions are important in shaping the tone of political debate between election campaigns. Some countries have regular, accessible debates between political leaders; in others the debate is rarer and harder to follow. Parliamentary question time (QT) is a prominent forum for regular elite-level debate, and QTs featuring open, accessible debate should help induce citizens to engage with politics by providing them with an information-laden political spectacle. The data show that these open QTs are associated with higher levels of political knowledge, partisanship, and turnout. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kenyan election campaigning took a novel turn in 2013 with the introduction of televised presidential debates. The two debates were widely celebrated as signalling a positive turn in Kenyan campaigning, from the politics of personality and ethnicity towards a more sober, issue-based form of electoral competition. Organised by the nation's main media houses, the debates offer a unique lens through which to consider the role the media defined for itself during the election period. This paper argues that the debates were staged as part of the media's broader project of ‘peace promotion’. In this way, actual debate between the candidates was of secondary importance to the spectacle of having all eight candidates amicably share the debate floor. This paper's approach thus emphasises the theatrical nature of the performances and the deliberate way in which they were designed to present a portrait of Kenya's maturing democracy. The paper concludes by situating these media spectacles within what is perceived to be a broader trend in Kenya whereby seductive images of the nation's future are produced and projected, thereby distracting from present realities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

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 paper aims to analyze the verbal and non-verbal behaviors adopted by participants of an electoral debate. To carry out this study, we adopted the theoretical and analytical principles of a theoretical-methodological approach developed by the Interaction & Formation Group, based at the University of Geneva. For this approach, language is an instrument for coordinating actions and a resource that allows interlocutors to communicate and negotiate knowledge, establish social links and transform the environment they are in, jointly building identity images and developing their interactional competence. Adopting the concepts, theoretical articulations and methods proposed by the group, this study analyzed an excerpt from the last electoral debate of the 2018 campaign for the Presidency of the Republic of Brazil. With the analysis, it was possible to observe that the interlocutors use verbal and non-verbal language to reveal expectations related to the context, showing its ruled, social and historical character, and to negotiate these same expectations, revealing that the meanings and the interaction itself are emerging, flexible and highly contextualised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Overwhelming anecdotal evidence suggests that politicians often promise more during an election campaign than they are willing or able to deliver once elected. In this paper, we present two signaling models to explain this phenomenon. In the first model, two candidates maximize their share of the vote. In the second model both try to convince the median voter. In each model, candidates rationally distort their true policy position. Voters, however, are not fooled. Upon observing election promises, they can rationally infer the true position of each candidate. Hence, the election outcome is not affected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Suvremena Lingvistika is the property of Suvremena Lingvistika 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.)

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]

Cultural—‘ethnic’—differences within national populations have recently become the focus of considerable academic and political debate. This paper considers their demographic significance and reviews some facts and theories on the demography of minorities.It cannot present a comprehensive theory of the demography of ethnic minorities. Such a theory must be part of a more general analysis of cultural effects on demographic variables—which so far is lacking in demography. Neither can it review exhaustively the facts of minority demography; they are not collected or made available in sufficient detail from many countries with minority or multiple nationalities. The aims of the paper are accordingly less ambitious: to consider the political and academic import of minority demographic differences, formulate questions that might usefully be asked about them, and present a few examples in detail. [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]

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]

Germany has received more than 1 million refugees in 2015. While international commentators have admired Chancellor Merkel's response to this "crisis," the situation is complex and the German government's actions and Merkel's own statements reflect multiple perspectives. In this paper, I apply a dialectical methodology that draws on a philosophical tradition dating back to the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to interpret the political debate of migration and Germany's response to the recent migrant crisis. I find that the dialectical approach permits making sense of the contradictory politics and back-and-forth debate related to Germany's response to the refugee crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twitter, the micro-blogging social media tool, has established a critical role in facilitating social engagement. Its low technical and economic barriers to uptake provide a readily accessible forum for public engagement with events such as televised political debates, and in this context provides a ‘backchannel’ to mainstream media, allowing users to comment on and engage in debates. Most recently during the 2014 Scottish Referendum, Twitter was used extensively by both ‘Better Together’ (pro-Unionist) and ‘Yes’ (pro-independence) campaigners. The aim of this research was to develop an understanding of the linked content present in tweets sent during three televised debates on the issue of Scottish Independence. Analysis of the linked content shows a broad subject proximity to the topics under discussion during the debates, but highlights the lack of specificity in relation to the peaks and troughs of Twitter traffic during the debates. The paper also highlights the use made of links to a variety of resources such as the mainstream media as well as more informal sources including user-generated image and video content to support political viewpoints, and argues that, while the use of such content is beneficial in terms of unifying perspectives, supporter activism and the gratification of the social need for connectivity, it does not act to convert political opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tunisia has developed an original diplomatic approach to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Relations between Tunisia and Israel (and more generally between Israel and the Arab world) have also influenced internal relations within Tunisia and the reactions and decisions of its Jewish community. This paper describes the evolution of the Tunisian government's attitudes towards Israel and the Palestinian issue in the post-independence era until the approval of the new Tunisian Constitution in 2014. The debate over whether to include an article regarding ‘the criminalisation of normalisation with Israel’ in the recently approved Constitution was considerable. Issues related to Israel have thus gained prominence in national debate, following a period in which they were primarily discussed by Ben Ali's political opponents. Through an analysis of articles, books, Internet sources and presidential speeches, this article examines the different positions taken by Tunisia towards Israel and how they have evolved over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Real-time response (RTR) measurement is an important technique for analyzing human processing of electronic media stimuli. Although it has been demonstrated that RTR data are reliable and internally valid, some argue that they lack external validity. The reason for this is that RTR measurement is restricted to a laboratory environment due to its technical requirements. This paper introduces a smartphone app that 1) captures real-time responses using the dial technique and 2) provides a solution for one of the most important problems in RTR measurement, the (automatic) synchronization of RTR data. In addition, it explores the reliability and validity of mobile RTR measurement by comparing the real-time reactions of two samples of young and welleducated voters to the 2013 German televised debate. Whereas the first sample participated in a classical laboratory study, the second sample was equipped with our mobile RTR system and watched the debate at home. Results indicate that the mobile RTR system yields similar results to the lab-based RTR measurement, providing evidence that laboratory studies using RTR are externally valid. In particular, the argument that the artificial reception situation creates artificial results has to be questioned. In addition, we conclude that RTR measurement outside the lab is possible. Hence, mobile RTR opens the door for large-scale studies to better understand the processing and impact of electronic media content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes how general election presidential debates have changed over the last four decades. It will trace the development of the debate format, the dynamics of visual rhetoric, and the patterns of discourse; and will compare the standards followed by John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon in the first series of general election presidential debates held in 1960, with those followed by Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in the latest series of debates held in 2012. It will also analyze debate videos and transcripts in order to identify the techniques used during both series of debates, and emphasize the similarities, differences, and effectiveness thereof. Considering the growing influence of the media on presidential campaigns over the last forty years, it is assumed that the rules and format for debates, as well as the dynamics of visual rhetoric and functions of debate discourse, have changed. This stands in contrast to the role of such debates in managing and guiding public opinion during elections, which has remained the same. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we make a comparative analysis of two pre-electoral debates belonging to two different traditions - the 2011 Rajoy-Rubalcaba debate and the first 2008 Obama-McCain debate - in terms of the manipulative processes used. For that purpose, we compare the similarities and differences in the use of the genre contributing to manipulation in the two debate traditions. Also, we identify the manipulative devices employed following coding scheme, which is complemented with those fallacies often encountered in the field of politics (; ; ). Various similarities in the use of the genre between the two debate traditions have been identified, such as in the use of strategies of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation that are inherently manipulative and that entail (de-)emphasizing Our/Their positive and Their/Our negative aspects (). The differences are related to the discursive strategies preferred, the role of the moderator in the debates, and the candidates' physical position in the confrontation, all of which may contribute to manipulation. Similarly, there are also similarities and differences in the candidates' use of manipulative processes as their strategy for winning the elections and a different preference for personal attacks and the dialectical battle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Slippery slope arguments are frequently dismissed as fallacious or weak arguments but are nevertheless commonly used in political and bioethical debates. This paper gives an overview of different variants of the argument commonly found in the literature and addresses their argumentative strength and the interrelations between them. The most common variant, the empirical slippery slope argument, predicts that if we do A, at some point the highly undesirable B will follow. I discuss both the question which factors affect likelihood of slippage and the relation between the strength of the prediction and the justificatory power of the argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents research data about features of discourses held on Twitter regarding the last presidential campaign in Colombia (2018) based on the agenda-setting theory. This case study had a quantitative research approach. The sample includes 62 Trending Topics and 620 tweets that were selected according to criteria of relevance and influence. A method of systematic content analysis was applied to gather data on sources and contents of messages using SPSS software statistical analysis. Five important findings are highlighted: 1. Traditional mass media were mainly responsible for defining the agenda on Twitter. 2. Within the context of the agenda outlined by the media, it was citizens who monopolised the discussion, thereby playing a key role in topic dissemination, candidates' visibility, framings, and assessments. 3. The main topic of discussion was the campaign debate itself rather than programmatic measures. 4. No correlation between the positioning and visibility of the candidates in Twitter and the electoral results could be observed. 5. Positive/non-aggressive tones prevailed over negative/aggressive ones. [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]

While Liberal Party leader - and now PM - Tony Abbott declared the 2013 Australian federal election to be a 'referendum on the carbon tax', debate on climate change by both major parties, as a problem and as a policy, appeared to be largely absent. This paper examines the discursive characteristics of this debate by examining the election launch speeches of both party leaders and by using the Leximancer text analytics software to map both the frequency and conceptual relationships within mainstream media coverage. The strength of this software is that it allows a researcher to both map the quantitative nature of the linguistic characteristics of a corpus of texts, and to use this conceptual mapping to examine the results qualitatively. The paper concludes that quantitatively, in comparison with the previous two elections, climate change was a second order issue. Further, a qualitative analysis of the debate that did occur, concluded that it was largely framed in relation to the politically contentious 'carbon tax'. Building on these results, it then discusses whether the apparent waning of political will by both major parties to substantially engage Australian voters on the need to take carbon abatement seriously, is a genuine reflection of voter apathy, a reaction to an over reliance upon opinion polls or symptomatic of a broader political and media disconnect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If candidates do not state clear issue positions, then voters cannot anticipate how the candidates will govern if elected nor hold candidates accountable for breaking campaign pledges. Yet, previous research argues electoral incentives lead candidates to avoid discussing the key issues of the day. Even though silence on issues is the modal campaign strategy, this paper argues that candidates systematically make clear issue statements on occasion. We identify three variables that predict whether a candidate will address an issue and the clarity of the candidate's stance on that issue: (i) the public salience of an issue; (ii) ideological congruence between candidate and district; and (iii) candidate quality. This argument is tested using data on candidate position-taking regarding the Iraq War and gay marriage collected from the campaign websites of U.S. House candidates in 2006 and 2008. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The paper herein presents a of research targeting the attitudes of mayors of Czech municipalities towards the financing of municipalities and the submitted legislative determination of taxes. Data reflect expert interviews with a representative sample of nine municipalities in Central Bohemian region. The research was originally incorporated into the doctoral thesis by Ilona Kruntorádová accomplished at the Institute of Political Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague; it is contextualized in the paper with political debates about the new rules conceming the funding of municipalities. Such rules create divisions among the municipalities as well as the parties within the Nečas coalition government. The main research findings underline the prevailing lack of funds facilitating the development of small municipalities, mediation of the interests of municipalities through personal contacts rather than special interest associations, and deeper divisions between small municipalities and large cities. The research herein should primarily serve as a pre-research for larger inquiries involving a broader sample of municipalities throughout the Czech Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Televised leaders' debates were, for the UK, a major innovation in the 2010 General Election campaign. Though common in many other democracies, they have not previously featured in Britain. Inevitably, their likely influence on the election result was much debated both before and after the event. A substantial mid-campaign surge in support for the Liberal Democrats after the party's leader was widely seen as having won the first debate seemed to vindicate a claim of substantial effects, though over the remainder of the campaign Liberal Democrat support subsided and the other parties recovered, returning to nearly the same levels all had been at when the campaign opened. So were the effects of the debates very short term, or did their influence last until polling day? The paper employs panel data to assess the impact of voters' perceptions of how the party leaders performed in debate on their evaluations of the leaders, their parties, government performance and vote choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]