Elvin T. Lim

The American people in crisis: a content analysis

This study examines how images of the American electorate were deployed after the 11 September 2001 terrorism incident and during the Clinton impeachment. Transcripts of congressional proceedings, news coverage, and presidential campaign addresses were analyzed to determine how the phrase the American people was used during these two crises and in unrelatedpresidential campaign speeches. The analysis considered the roles, actions, qualities, and circumstances ascribed to the people, as well as the time orientation and the forces aligned against the people. The results show that (1) relative to presidential campaign rhetoric, both crises resulted in greater concentration on the electorate; (2) the crises differed from one another as well, with the impeachment texts featuring a contentious electorate and the 11 September texts identifying the peoples psychological strengths and anxieties; and (3) both crises were also affected by exogenous factors-partisanship in the case of impeachment, and the passage of time for the terrorism incident.

Issue definition and the opinion-policy link: public preferences and health care spending in the US and UK

This article explores the extent to which yearly changes in health spending reflect yearly changes in public preferences. Time series modelling suggests that health care spending is remarkably more responsive to yearly changes in public opinion in the US than in the UK. A content analysis of party manifestos suggests the significant role of ‘issue definition’ in accounting for this difference. Health care issues in the US have more often been viewed as problems of expenditure, while UK policy-makers have tended to focus on efficiency. Results suggest that the responsiveness of health care expenditures to public preferences in the US and UK is linked to the way in which health care issues are differently defined by policy-makers.

Gendered Metaphors of Women in Power: the Case of Hillary Clinton as Madonna, Unruly Woman, Bitch and Witch

Hillary Rodham Clinton was the first First Lady to move into the White House with a full-time professional career of her own, the first First Lady to win elected office in the US Senate, and the first woman to seriously contend for a major party’s nomination for the US presidency. As Hillary Clinton stood at the frontier of women’s struggle to break into the public sphere in their own right, she became the target for a number of highly stylised and gendered metaphors used to conceptualise her role in public life. Defenders and critics of Hillary Clinton have characterised her as a Madonna, an Unruly Woman and variants thereof: a Bitch, and a Witch.1 In this chapter, I critically examine the usage of these metaphors in books and newspaper articles about the senator by neutral observers, her supporters and detractors to unpack the layers of resistance that still exist against women in American public life. My thesis is that gendered conceptual metaphors, in variously imposing and/or retracting ‘masculine’ and/or ‘feminine’ traits, empower and disempower woman leaders.2 Indeed, while some gendered conceptual metaphors of women in power (Madonna and Unruly Woman) give only by taking, others (Bitch and Witch) mostly only take.

The Anti-Federalist Strand in Progressive Politics and Political Thought

In this article, the author argues that the Progressives can be as much characterized as the antistatists of the nineteenth century as the statists of the twentieth century because their overriding goal was the destruction of the party state and not, directly, the creation of the bureaucratic state. They found in Anti-Federalist political thought a general antistatist template that they used to articulate their specific objection to the nineteenth-century party state. This template comprised a mutual commitment to simple government, the common good as a preinstitutional reality, democracy, direct and responsive government, fear of elite rule, civic education, and cultural homogeneity.

Tracking the Language of Space and Time, 1948-2008

This article explores how contemporary historians can avail themselves of quantitative approaches to examine how elusive concepts like ‘time’ and ‘space’ have been used in the public domain. By making use of specifically designed programs, historians can use digital tools to harness an unprecedented mass of information. This is a particularly important methodological innovation at a time of rapidly expanding data: news, speeches, and commentary are available first electronically, and they are available on countless sites in an unprecedented array of formats. Mastering these sources digitally is not only imperative for the contemporary historian; it also provides essential source material for understanding how language and meanings change over time, between contexts, and across different media.