Christopher B. Chapp

Moral Power: How Public Opinion on Culture War Issues Shapes Partisan Predispositions and Religious Orientations

Party-driven and religion-driven models of opinion change posit that individuals revise their positions on culture war issues to ensure consonance with political and religious predispositions. By contrast, models of issue-driven change propose that public opinion on cultural controversies lead people to revise their partisan and religious orientations. Using data from four panel studies covering the period 1992–2012, we pit the party- and religion-based theories of opinion change against the issue-based model of change. Consistent with the standard view, party and religion constrain culture war opinion. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, but consistent with our novel theory, opinions on culture war issues lead people to revise their partisan affinities and religious orientations. Our results imply that culture war attitudes function as foundational elements in the political and religious belief systems of ordinary citizens that match and sometimes exceed partisan and religious predispositions in terms of motivating power.

Improving Tobacco-Free Advocacy on College Campuses: A Novel Strategy to Aid in the Understanding of Student Perceptions About Policy Proposals

Abstract Objective: Tobacco-control policy proposals are usually met with opposition on college campuses. Research to understand students’ viewpoints about health-related policy proposals and messaging strategies, however, does not exist. This study investigated students’ perceptions about a smoke-free policy proposal to help understand their positions of support and opposition and to inform the development of effective messaging strategies. Participants: In January 2012, 1,266 undergraduate students from a midwestern university completed an online questionnaire about smoke-free campus policies. Methods: Responses were coded and analyzed using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software and chi-square, independent-samples t tests, and binary logistic models. Results: Most students who supported a smoke-free policy considered environmental or aesthetic conditions, whereas most opponents used personal freedom frames of thought. Supporters viewed smoking policies in personal terms, and opponents suggested means-ends policy reasoning. Conclusions: Taken together, points of reference and emotions about proposed policies provided insight about participants’ perspectives to help inform effective policy advocacy efforts.

Going Vague: Ambiguity and Avoidance in Online Political Messaging

Researchers have long investigated the conditions that promote the unambiguous communication of issues in political campaigns; however, previous research has been largely theoretic or has only tested ambiguous communication on a limited range of issues. We address these gaps, making three principal contributions. First, we provide an extensive empirical test of ambiguous communication, scoring every issue addressed on website “issues pages” from House candidates in 2014. Second, we accomplish this by using a supervised learning content analysis procedure that allows us to score a large volume of text based on a smaller subset of hand-coded text. This allows us to not only examine whether candidates comment on an issue but also the clarity of their message. Third, this article provides empirical support for how candidates’ communication strategies are shaped not only by the candidates’ personal characteristics but also the characteristics of the district. We find that district heterogeneity is an important predictor of ambiguous communication. Evidence also indicates that issue ownership and ideological extremity play a decisive role in the decision to “go vague.”

Religious rhetoric meets the target audience: Narrowcasting faith in presidential elections

ABSTRACT Research documents politicians’ use of religious rhetoric and its effects on the public, but little work has investigated the considerations influencing the decision to use religious rhetoric in the first place. We theorize that politicians’ use of religious rhetoric is determined by four considerations: the alignment between the speaker’s and audience’s religiosity, the acceptability of the speaker’s denomination to the audience, the speaker’s religious history, and the speaker’s party. Using the 2012 presidential election as a test case, we pair county-level religion data with a content analysis of 264 stump speeches to examine how the religious aspects of candidate rhetoric changed depending on the religious contours of a community. The evidence provides insight into how and why candidates “narrowcast” faith.

Language for Winning Hearts and Minds: Verb Aspect in U.S. Presidential Campaign Speeches for Engaging Emotion.

How does language influence the emotions and actions of large audiences? Functionally, emotions help address environmental uncertainty by constraining the body to support adaptive responses and social coordination. We propose emotions provide a similar function in language processing by constraining the mental simulation of language content to facilitate comprehension, and to foster alignment of mental states in message recipients. Consequently, we predicted that emotion-inducing language should be found in speeches specifically designed to create audience alignment – stump speeches of United States presidential candidates. We focused on phrases in the past imperfective verb aspect (“a bad economy was burdening us”) that leave a mental simulation of the language content open-ended, and thus unconstrained, relative to past perfective sentences (“we were burdened by a bad economy”). As predicted, imperfective phrases appeared more frequently in stump versus comparison speeches, relative to perfective phrases. In a subsequent experiment, participants rated phrases from presidential speeches as more emotionally intense when written in the imperfective aspect compared to the same phrases written in the perfective aspect, particularly for sentences perceived as negative in valence. These findings are consistent with the notion that emotions have a role in constraining the comprehension of language, a role that may be used in communication with large audiences.

Economic Appeals in Unequal Communities: Stump Speeches in the 2012 Presidential Election

The 2012 presidential election was, like many elections before it, a referendum on the incumbent administration’s economic stewardship. Romney regularly argued that his own business experience would give the national economy the management it needed, and blamed Obama administration policies for a slow economic recovery. Obama countered that his administration had done a good deal to stop the bleeding caused by the Bush years, and would have done more had it not been for the Republican party obstructing key reforms in congress. Front-and-center in this exchange was the issue of class, both in terms of growing economic disparities, and in the extent to which the candidates themselves embodied different ends of the economic spectrum. A leaked YouTube video of Romney singling out the “47 percent who are with [Obama], who are dependent upon government, [and] … who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them” further focused attention on a national conversation revolving around issues of class and the state of the U.S. economy.2