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Like other Asian democracies, family politics is not unknown to South Korea. The triumph of Park Geun–hye, daughter of former authoritarian ruler Park Chung–hee, in the 2012 presidential election was in particular interpreted as a precursor of 'dynastization' in Korean politics. Nevertheless, up to the present day, political families in South Korea have been significantly less successful in securing offices through electoral competition than their Asian counterparts. Using extensive evidence from statistical and documentary sources, I argue the following: First, South Korean family politicians are more likely to face unfavorable popular sentiment towards their candidacies in elections than family politicians in other Asian democracies. Second, in addition to inheriting their predecessors' political advantages, they are required to enhance their own electoral appeal by properly justifying that their electoral participation is compatible with popular demands for meritocracy and procedural fairness. This argument highlighting politico–cultural requirements, or what I call justifiable narratives, for dynastic succession is empirically supported by case studies of four South Korean family politicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent do supporters of electoral losers and nonvoters maintain lower evaluations of institutions post-election? A sizable literature identifies a divergence in perceptions among winners and losers regarding democratic satisfaction, with few studies extending this to perceptions of other electoral and nonelectoral institutions nor to include nonvoters. The timing of the 2015 Asian Barometer survey in South Korea allows us to identify evaluation prior to Park Geun-Hye's impeachment scandal. Analysis consistently finds that those who supported the losing presidential candidate in 2012 maintained lower evaluations of institutions, with inconsistent results regarding nonvoters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's data-driven campaigns, presidential targeting strategies rely on detailed perceptions about the political leanings and policy positions of Americans to decide which registered voters to contact and which messages to emphasize in their outreach. However, identifying supporters and opponents of a candidate's policy positions is far from foolproof. This reality results in some citizens encountering political message(s) on congruent issues, where their issue stance aligns with the messaging candidate, and others encountering incongruent issue message(s), where the candidate and message recipient do not share the same position. Examining official contact records from the 2012 presidential campaign of Republican Mitt Romney, I find evidence that Romney's campaign had some success when targeting Democrats with congruent issues. Messaging Democrats with an issue where they and Romney share common ground is associated with decreased support for Obama, increased abstention, and increased support for Romney. Contacting Democrats with an incongruent message and contacting Republicans with either an incongruent or congruent issue message had minimal effects on the voting behavior of the recipient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parties need to win elections, but they also heed the policy preferences of activists to provide the incentive to mobilize. Moving beyond the debate as to whether parties as a whole are policy or office driven, we examine groups within parties and identify different factions that place differential emphasis on office-seeking versus policy-demanding. Using data from the 2012 Convention Delegate Study of Democratic and Republican Party national delegates, we identify distinct factional groups within each party. We map these factions within each party, finding policy-driven and office-driven factions of delegates in both Republican and Democratic parties. We evaluate each group's response to political and party involvement, support for the larger party organization, and response to both intra- and interparty conflict. Finally, we make clear the picture of factional relationships within each party by accounting for how factional goals are integrated into the party organization over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyses of television news and major newspapers have led to the critique that "the media" ignore the issues in campaigns, which could explain studies that show limited effects for media coverage on knowledge. These studies overlook great variation in the quantity and quality of news coverage in local information environments. Using data collected from local newspaper websites during the 2012 American presidential election, we show the quality and quantity of local news campaign coverage differ substantially between battleground and nonbattleground states. In an effort to differentiate themselves from other news outlets, newspapers in battleground states play up the local angle (e.g., candidate visits), resulting in less attention to issues in their stories. These findings suggest the voters most important to the election outcome (i.e., those in battleground states) may have less information on candidate issue positions available within their local media market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last twenty years, there has been a tremendous amount written on “negativity” in political campaigns. Yet, there is a conceptual disconnect between the definition of negativity used by researchers and how citizens define negativity. In this article, we show how large this disparity is and what its consequences are. Using a nationally representative online survey of 17,400 Americans and nearly 100 scholars of American politics who viewed presidential ads from the 2012 general election, we show that citizen perceptions of negativity are much stronger predictors of political participation than scholar codings of negativity. This means researchers need to give serious thought to how they operationalize negativity in their work. If we have any interest in understanding how voters are affected by campaign information that they perceive as being negative, then we must collect data consistent with the public’s understanding of negativity. Otherwise, we risk the continuation of this conceptual disconnect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional political wisdom holds that policies that make voting easier will increase turnout and ultimately benefit Democratic candidates. We challenge this assumption, questioning the ability of party strategists to predict which changes to election law will advantage them. Drawing on previous research, we theorize that voting laws affect who votes in diverse ways depending on the specific ways that they reduce the costs of participating. We assemble datasets of county-level vote returns in the 2004, 2008, and 2012 presidential elections and model these outcomes as a function of early voting and registration laws, using both cross-sectional regression and difference-in-difference models. Unlike Election Day registration, and contrary to conventional wisdom, the results show that early voting generally helps Republicans. We conclude with implications for partisan manipulation of election laws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To be elected President of the United States, a candidate must create a story that both resonates with and persuades the electorate. Gardner suggested that "leaders achieve their effectiveness chiefly through the stories they relate" and that there are three types of leadership stories: Ordinary, Innovative and Visionary. The differences between the 2012 and 2016 U.S. Presidential elections are extreme. As the 2016 election was one of unusual and unexpected moments as compared with the more tame and typical election in 2012, this study compared the stories of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump with those of the 2012 election between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. Results from the 2012 election found that Romney's story fit into the category of Ordinary leader, while Obama's story was one attributed to an Innovative leader. T tests found large and significant differences between candidate preference and story credibility and whether the stories motivated the respondents to vote. However, for the 2016 election, both candidates had innovative stories, and this may explain how one candidate won the popular vote, while the other received the majority of electoral votes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined how Republican and Democratic candidates utilized Twitter to manage their impressions during the 2012 U.S. Senate elections, and examined their discussion of political issues and character traits across three types of tweets: campaign tweets, campaign-selected retweets, and tweets that mentioned their respective opponent. Candidates aligned with and trespassed party-based ownership of issues and traits across the tweet types. In the aggregate, Republicans discussed Republican-owned issues and traits more than Democrats, and Democrats emphasized Democrat-owned issues more than Republicans. This party alignment broke down when examined across winning and losing candidates, yielding varying routes to electoral success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have emphasized the importance of an informed citizenry for a healthy democracy. As a result, research has examined whether campaign information fosters positive or negative democratic outcomes. This article examines the relationship between information seeking and skepticism. We also examine whether skepticism leads to democratically beneficial outcomes. We examine these relationships using survey data collected during the course of the 2012 Presidential Election. We found an over-time relationship between campaign information seeking and skepticism. We also found that skepticism leads to increased knowledge at the end of the election through information seeking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examines photographs of candidates in the 2012 presidential general election to understand how newspapers presented Obama and Romney. Significant differences existed in regard to behavior, context and perspective, but photo coverage was balanced on the whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the use of policy issues within horse-race coverage of the 2012 presidential election to determine how such issues were reported in two national newspapers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A study of leading newspaper endorsements in the 2012 presidential election shows newspapers framed Obama as a leader based on his performance on a variety of national issues, and newspapers that endorsed Romney framed him largely as the best candidate to fix the struggling economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the effects of newspaper endorsements of candidates in the 2012 U.S. presidential election. By endorsing a particular candidate, newspapers appear to play an important role in terms of motivating college students to make their voting decision or jump on the bandwagon of a candidate who is widely endorsed by the press. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a nationally representative data set (N = 3,000), the Public Religion Research Institute’s American Values Survey, we conduct multivariate regression analysis to determine the empirical impact of attitudes regarding the birth control mandate and abortion on presidential vote choice. We also conduct factor analysis to determine whether voters conceptualized the birth control mandate and abortion similarly. We find that support for the Obama administration’s birth control mandate was significantly related to voting for Obama for both women and men voters, although the impact was stronger for women. However, the impact of the “War on Women” rhetoric on voters’ choices was limited to the issue of insurance coverage for birth control rather than extending to the issue of abortion. Unlike attitudes about abortion, we find that voters conceptualized the birth control mandate less as a “culture war” issue and more as a “role of government” issue. Given this conceptualization of the mandate by voters, our findings reaffirm previous research that suggests that the gender gap in voting is largely driven by attitudinal differences regarding the role of government in providing social welfare benefits and equal opportunity for women. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

People tend to predict their preferred political candidate will win an election. The resulting “surprised losers” are examined as playing a role in the established gap between electoral winners and losers on such important outcomes as trust in government and satisfaction with the electoral process and democracy. Exposure to Fox News programming can increase wishful thinking among Republican candidate supporters, but among surprised losers, it does not increase negative attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Racial attitudes toward African American candidates are partially explained by symbolic racism, which has replaced overt racism in responses to these candidates. However, as typically operationalized, symbolic racism as applied to candidate assessments fails to account for the emotions generated by a political campaign. Symbolic racism's effects are moderated when emotional responses to Barack Obama are included in a candidate evaluation model, while emotions remain an important predictor. While symbolic racism and negative emotions lower evaluations, the presence of the positive emotions generated by the 2012 campaign counteracted both. Inclusion of both symbolic racism and emotion is necessary to understand perceptions of Obama as a black presidential candidate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional vote-choice models include variables such as party identification, assessments of the economy, as well as other demographic characteristics. We argue that variables that tap shared racial/ethnic identity or some such similar dimension can enhance Latino vote-choice models beyond the traditional model. We evaluate Barack Obama and Mitt Romney's cross-racial mobilization of Latino voters during the 2012 Presidential election. Using a survey of several thousand Latino voters, we find that these candidates' policy stances vis-a-vis immigration and their ability to convey care and concern to the Latino community are important variables that guide Latino vote choice. Implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In mid-2011, the Florida legislature reduced the state's early voting period from fourteen days to eight and eliminated the final Sunday of early voting. We compare observed voting patterns in 2012 with those in the 2008 General Election and find that racial/ethnic minorities, registered Democrats, and those without party affiliation had significant early voting participation drops and that voters who cast ballots on the final Sunday in 2008 were disproportionately unlikely to cast a valid ballot in 2012. Florida's decision to truncate early voting may have diminished participation rates of those already least likely to vote. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented to a special section on race and the 2012 U.S. presidential election, with discussion of articles on topics including the views of Latino voters, the impact of state restrictions on early voting, and the emotions associated with voters' racial attitudes.

An introduction is presented in which the editor notes the theme of the issue, the 2012 U.S. presidential election, and discusses articles on subjects including the use of political satire in the campaign, racist appeals used by candidate Mitt Romney, and psychological aspects of partisanship.

This research tested the conventional wisdom that interactive voice recognition (IVR; also known as robocalls or auto calls) are not listened to by receivers. The study found that three out of four people (75%) listen to over 19 s of a message, which equates to over 40 words. The vast majority of people, 97%, listen to at least 6 s. This innovative, unobtrusive field approach for measuring actual listening time eliminates self-report bias. The unique data set, provided by a third-party vendor, consisted of 156 call projects with a total of 389,588 live answered phone calls from the last week of the 2012 election. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent studies show that women running for vice president or president of the United States as major political party candidates often are covered differently than their male opponents by the media. This study examines Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann’s television news coverage compared to her male opponents in the months leading up to the primary stage of the 2012 campaign. Our analysis shows that Bachmann received less coverage, which was more often written in the game than issue frame. She was more likely to be associated with masculine than feminine issues. However, Bachmann received less image and negative coverage than her male opponents. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Consistent with other media covering the 2012 presidential campaign, political cartoons attended to the events surrounding the three presidential debates between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. While political cartoons offer a humorous visual commentary, they are part of the campaign media narrative, and are perhaps more memorable than many stories or columns themselves. This analysis discusses the attention to and portrayal of particular candidate performance in the 2012 presidential debates, and how particular statements or behavior was visually demonstrated in political cartoons, and also discusses the implication of such portrayals and attention in cartoons. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The cross-pressured citizen—a person who affiliates with one political party but plans to vote for the nominee of another—embodies the complicated nature of political decision making. Enduring considerable scrutiny since the pioneering campaign studies of the 1940s and 1950s, the role of the cross-pressured partisan in a presidential election campaign is still not fully understood by scholars. First, this study explores who the cross-pressured partisan was in the 2012 presidential campaign by examining the formative factors that influenced the likelihood of prospective defection from one’s “home” party. Second, we explain how cross-pressured citizens behaved when seeking out news media compared to their consistent counterparts. Using national survey data collected at the midpoint of the 2012 campaign, we find that approval of President Barack Obama was a critical factor in understanding cross-pressured partisanship. Furthermore, cross-pressured Republicans were significantly less likely to attend to conservative cable programming compared to consistent Republicans. The results present a compelling extension of over seven decades of work examining the cross-pressured citizen. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article identifies a marked difference in the type of race-based appeals that dominated Barack Obama’s presidential reelection contest in 2012 from his inaugural campaign in 2008. Racist appeals by Mitt Romney and the right in 2012 supplanted the racial appeals by Obama and the left in 2008. We focus our attention on a particularly salient form of racist appeal, one based on the long-standing stereotypes of black laziness and taking advantage. Specifically, we outline the historical underpinnings of these stereotypes. We then demonstrate how Romney and the right wove these underlying stereotypes into a seamless racist narrative—through political advertisements, online messaging, political speeches and debate statements—beginning with the Republican primary and continuing through the general election. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This report explores the variables related to partisan selective media exposure, a process by which people select media outlets and content consistent with their political predispositions. This study employs national survey data (N = 876) during the month of October 2012 immediately prior to the U.S. presidential election. Political orientation (i.e., liberal, moderate, or conservative) served as the dependent variable. The analysis revealed that political orientation was related to gender, race, and religion. The civic engagement variables of participation in a church project and participation in volunteer work within one’s community were also related. Finally, the results suggest that conservatives were most prone to use conservative talk radio, Christian radio and TV, and Fox News. Liberals were more prone to use PBS and Facebook. As such, the data indicate that audience members appear to seek out partisan media and messages consistent with their political leanings. The implications of partisan selective media exposure concerning the development of political knowledge are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, the author researches the coverage of the U.S. and Russian presidential campaigns of 2012 in terms of media endarkenment, a process of media influence that ultimately shrinks the potential for a vibrant public sphere where informed citizens debate crucial issues. Using the works of Herman and Chomsky as well as McQuail, the study reveals the methodology of a process of media influence (intended or unintended) by which both the intellectual level of the viewers and the number of informed citizens decrease. A textual analysis of election coverage by national TV channels of both countries uncovers some of the different forms that media endarkenment takes, including the construction of a false reality, intimidation, and simplification. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Studies have shown that same-sex marriage (SSM) ballot measures affected voter turnout and primed voters in a manner that aided the Republican Party in 2004. However, if attitude strength plays a role in these spillover effects, then recent increases in the intensity of support for SSM on the left may have eroded--or even reversed--the pro-Republican electoral boost of these measures. Using individual- and county-level data, I demonstrate that more recent votes on SSM have mobilized more pro-Obama SSM supporters than pro-Republican social conservatives. These findings are important for understanding how ballot measures may potentially affect candidate elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2012 election was marked by discussions of women’s issues from abortion to equal pay, and both presidential candidates employed strategies designed to win female voters. Since women vote in larger numbers than men and are more likely to be swing voters, it was imperative that the candidates win support among women. This study draws from group identification theories to better understand the process of gender socialization that influences young women’s perceptions of candidates and the effect of targeted advertising. The findings of this study build upon existing group identification theory and suggest the need for more nuanced theories of female voters that take into consideration identification with one’s gender group as well as beliefs about women’s roles in society. Specifically, this study found that strong gender group identification was associated with higher favorability ratings of Obama. Women holding more egalitarian gender role beliefs were also more likely to rate Obama favorably. Gender group identification did not influence ratings of Romney, but women with more traditional gender role beliefs rated Romney more favorably. No direct support was found for an effect of targeted political advertising in this study, however, we argue that additional research is needed in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study explores the effects of televised presidential debate viewing on young citizens’ candidate evaluations and normative democratic attitudes, including political cynicism and political information efficacy. Findings revealed that debate viewing decreases young citizens’ political cynicism and strengthens political information efficacy. Longitudinal analysis tracked young citizens’ democratic attitudes from pre-debate to post-election, finding that one’s political information efficacy intensifies throughout the course of the ongoing campaign, but debates’ immediate effect of reducing political cynicism is not sustained as the campaign progresses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As an online experiment with a 2 × 3 factorial design, this study manipulates participants’ (N = 441) exposure to a candidate’s (Barack Obama or Mitt Romney) post-election speech along with additional messages about bipartisanship (supporting bipartisanship, challenging bipartisanship, no message). Results showed main and interaction effects on all relationship factors based on experimental cell. In addition, data indicate that assessment of candidate sincerity was most strongly affected by ideological strength, more so than relationship or exposure support messages calling for bipartisanship. The study focuses on first-time voters and is framed through the lens of political public relations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Promotion of the DREAM Act during the 2012 campaign presented an opportunity to examine how social media might cast youth as information leaders in the promotion of voting in Latino families. To identify opportunities and barriers to enactment of the information-leading role, we triangulate findings from a post-election survey of young adults and an analysis of campaign strategies focused on access to higher education. We find that young Latinos lagged behind non-Latinos in voting and in discussion about politics with parents and that campaign messaging typically ignored the family as a context for the cultivation of aspiration through information exchange. We conclude with recommendations for how mobilization efforts in future elections can harness new media by recruiting youth as information leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A national mail survey of adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 (n = 876) was conducted immediately before the U.S. presidential election (October 2012) to investigate socialization agents that may correlate with political and civic engagement. The relative importance of potential correlates of engagement including demographics, parents, peers, schools, religion, traditional media, social networks, and digital communication were evaluated. Regression analysis revealed that civically engaged youth identify with a religion, participate in civic education activities at school and extracurricular activities, take action (e.g., boycotting or buycotting), develop attitudes about citizenship, and engage in online/social media political activities. Politically engaged youth come from higher income households, discuss news and politics, take action, and are very prone to engage in online/social media political activities. While a wider range of activities appear to be related to civic engagement, those who are politically engaged appear to have a strong interest in online media usage. Implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Unprecedented numbers of negative political advertisements aired in battleground markets during the 2012 primaries, the first presidential campaign since the 2010 Citizens United decision. Grounded in theories of involvement, this investigation parses the influence of partisanship and political expression on the affective effects of negative Super PAC ads. Based on a pretest–posttest design with two experimental conditions and 585 participants, the results indicate both enduring and situational involvement exerted significant main and interaction effects on viewers’ affect toward the general election candidates and the political parties. Driven by Independents who did not engage in political expression, these Super PAC ads evoked significant net decreases in affect toward Mitt Romney and the Republican Party and net increases toward Barack Obama and the Democratic Party. These results suggest enduring and situational involvement moderate the affective effects of negative Super PAC advertising in primary contests. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, we profile the advertising activities and deception levels of the top 2012 spending independent expenditure groups that focused on the presidential contest. From December 1, 2011, through Election Day, November 6, 2012, independent expenditure groups spent more than $360 million on presidential television advertising, according to Kantar Media CMAG. More than a fifth of the dollars spent by the top groups purchased ads containing at least one claim judged as misleading by independent fact checkers. The proportion of dollars that these groups spent on ads containing at least one deception was much greater during the primaries than afterward. During the primaries, the pro-Romney super PAC “Restore Our Future” led the pack both in dollars spent on ads containing at least one deception and in the proportion of its ads found deceptive by the fact checkers. During the general election, in the post-primary period, the pro-Obama super PAC “Priorities USA Action” devoted the most dollars and greatest proportion of its total dollars to ads in which fact checkers found at least one deceptive claim. During some but not all of the 2012 election year, the percentage of third party ads containing at least one deceptive claim was higher among those groups not required to disclose their donors than it was among those required to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examines the “Twitter election of 2012,” and specifically young citizens’ “social watching” behaviors while live-tweeting a 2012 nationally televised Republican primary debate. We find several important relationships between key demographic, social, and political engagement variables and participants’ social watching activity (frequency of tweeting while watching the debate). We also find important links between tweet content (frequency of candidate mentions in tweets) and debate viewers’ candidate evaluations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Here, we track the language patterns of Mitt Romney and other Republican candidates during 2008 and 2012 and contrast them with their Democratic counterparts to better understand the language of partisanship in the U.S. We employ DICTION (www.dictionsoftware.com), an automated text-analysis tool, to process some 8,000 campaign documents. We find (a) that Mitt Romney was an unconventional Republican in 2012 (but not in 2008); (b) that Romney employed both “Republican” and “Democratic” language and did so to good effect (both in the primaries and in the general election); (c) that Barack Obama matched Romney in these ways, departing sharply from his own 2008 campaign style; and (d) that the candidates increasingly resembled one another as election day approached. We conclude that, no matter what their party of origin, all national politicians must be versed in the Democratic/Republican lexicon, a requirement that distinguishes the American political ethos. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mitt Romney’s work at Bain Capital became a centerpiece of the primary campaign in January, 2012. Because its portfolio and practices are so diverse, talking points about Bain were at first unpolished. Such inconsistent and haphazard discussion provided an excellent opportunity to study the refinement of campaign messages to their most politically effective and palatable forms. Furthermore, because private equity is so complex, its net effect is fairly debated—among economists, politicians, and voters alike. Thus, conversations about Bain Capital were often disjointed, allowing politicians a great deal of freedom to frame the issue however they wanted regardless of their opponents’ statements. Value appeal strategies of reconstructing, bypassing, counterblocking, overriding, and undermining, as defined by Cook, are central to this study, which examines the Republican primary debates and the deliberations surrounding Bain Capital as a representation of free market enterprise. The goal of the article is to explore the dynamics of politic debates within primary contests in which there are shared common values. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 2012, only the GOP had a contested primary. As of March 2012 none of the four candidates remaining in the race (Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum) had secured enough delegates to claim the nomination, indicating that this primary season would drag on (McCain clinched the 2008 Republican nomination on March 4, 2008). This protracted primary meant that the Republicans had to devote most of their efforts to their immediate opponents, rather than concentrating on President Barack Obama. Obama did not have to worry about attacks from his own party. This study applies Benoit’s functional theory to 143 primary television spots from this campaign. This sample of ads broke with tradition by attacking as much as they acclaimed. The topic of utterance was split about evenly between policy and character. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay reports the results of an analysis of undecided swing state voters during the six presidential debates of the 2008 and 2012 elections. Combining Real Time Response with a pretest-posttest design, the researchers identify the overall impact of the debates on undecided voters, both successful and unsuccessful message strategies, and changes in the overall perception of the candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Analyzing Ohio newspaper articles (n = 466), this study investigates the framing of Mitt Romney in a key battleground state during the 2012 presidential election. Campaign officials and political journalists contend that attacks launched by President Obama in late spring defined Romney for the remainder of the campaign. Results suggest partial support for this claim by revealing increased use of negative media frames after the attacks began. Specifically, framing of Romney as a “vulture capitalist” increased significantly during the Obama frame-building effort. Findings offer theoretical insights into the concepts of frame building and “content bias” in media coverage of political campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The explanatory principles of understanding and consistency are used to detail the past, present, and future of individual-level political communication media effects research. It is argued that the field of political communication is at a crossroads, with preferences for a dominant explanatory principle shifting from understanding back to consistency. In addition to understanding and consistency, it is argued that political communication researchers need to begin introducing additional explanatory principles (e.g., hedonism) to the field for the generation of new lines of inquiry. A call for embracing a diversity of explanatory principles is offered, and the utility of such an approach is explored within the context of the 2012 U.S. presidential election. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The empty chair used by actor-director Clint Eastwood during his headline-grabbing speech at the Republican National Convention is a particularly compelling example of a widely circulated image that resonated for the balance of the 2012 presidential campaign. Eastwood had criticized and mocked the empty chair as if the Democratic president were sitting in it. Following the convention, at least two incidents were reported where an empty chair was hung from a tree by a rope, interpreted by many as racially offensive displays meant to symbolize the lynching of President Barack Obama. Analyzing publicly recognizable images is an important endeavor for rhetorical scholars because images have the capability of embodying public identity and contributing to the formation of public culture. This study investigates how the circulation of particular images, such as the empty chair, during a political campaign may develop verbally unspoken arguments and provide additional insight about American identity as it relates to issues of race. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent presidential elections have seen the rise of the candidate memoir or manifesto. Using nine of these books authored by presidential hopefuls in the 2012 election, this article argues that this emerging genre plays an important role in what Judith Trent has called the surfacing stage of political campaigns. In addition to tracing the history of the genre, the article explains the function of such books and draws examples from the 2012 GOP primary to identify their recurring formal characteristics. The article concludes by discussing the study’s implications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented for this issue which mentions articles that focus on social media's influence on the 2012 U.S. presidential election including one on New Hampshire voters' thoughts on the ideal candidate and an essay on the Iowa caucus and how technology affects democracy.

The elections of president Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 provided pivotal moments in U.S. relations with foreign publics. Examining the kind of communication cultivated between public diplomacy practitioners and publics, this article focuses on social media discourse about the 2012 U.S. election posted to U.S. diplomacy efforts on Facebook. We analyze information generated by U.S. embassy sites in Bangladesh, Egypt, and Pakistan to understand the qualities of the communication engendered by these public diplomacy overtures, the nature of public argument via the media platform, and how the election served as a process to further contemporary U.S. public diplomacy. We found that the discussion that took place in response to the announcement of Obama’s reelection did not resemble a deliberative forum for debating U.S. foreign policy or regional implications. Rather, much of the messaging on these sites constituted what we term “spreadable epideictic.” Implications are charted for research and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examines Twitter use by presidential candidates during the 2012 primary election. The Twitter feeds and activity levels of candidates from the Republican, Democratic, Libertarian, and Americans Elect parties and their campaigns were gathered over a 3-month span. Variables examined include the number of tweets posted, followers gained, and followers added as well as the occurrence of hashtags, user mentions, hyperlinks, and content categories within tweets. Results showed candidates’ presence on Twitter was not uniform. Tweet frequency did not necessarily result in followers gained. Interestingly, the candidates who tweeted the most were not major party nominees. As the Republican primary campaign progressed, the amount of daily tweeting by the candidates was not higher than it had been earlier in the primary season. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Much academic debate has centered on the impact of new technologies on democracy. This study examines the effects of social media on political participation and candidate image evaluations in the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses. Multivariate analyses show that social media have no effects on likelihood of caucus attendance but influence perceptions of candidate traits among the sample of Iowans drawn here. The study also addresses the role of traditional media as channels for political information during the caucuses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social media sites have become the new battleground in U.S. presidential politics. In helping to create an identifiable image for candidates, photographs on Facebook have become a convenient outlet for displaying both advertising and candid images of the candidate. While scholars have begun to recognize the impact of photographs on political campaign, Grabe and Bucy have identified potential frames that news photographs enable campaigns to use in hopes of casting candidates in a particular light. This essay utilizes a close semiotic analysis to understand how Internet images convey meaning that helps to create those frames. The essay concludes with a discussion of the utility of semiotic analysis in understanding campaign images and the potential for Internet images for framing campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]