Lori Cox Han

New Strategies for an Old Medium: The Weekly Radio Addresses of Reagan and Clinton

Of the untold values of the radio, one is the great intimacy it has brought among our people. Through its mysterious channels we come to wider acquaintance with surroundings and men. President Herbert Hoover, Radio Address to the Nation, September 18,1929

The President Over the Public: The Plebiscitary Presidency at Center Stage

This chapter begins with a narrower version of the question posed throughout this book—does the public presidency pose a threat to constitutional democracy in America? While the framers may have been somewhat ambivalent about how strong the president should be, with James Madison arguing for a government that limited itself through checks and balances to diffuse power in Federalist 51 while Alexander Hamilton argued for a powerful and energetic executive in Federalist 70, the public arena has certainly provided some presidents with broader powers than perhaps intended. As with other powers of the office, the public aspects of the presidency have had important historical developments, particularly during the twentieth century. The proliferation of daily newspapers at the turn of the twentieth century, followed by the advent of radio, then television, and then the expansion of newer technologies like the Internet and satellite transmissions, have created myriad opportunities for presidents to communicate. Along with the opportunities came the expectation that the president would be an effective communicator, using the bully pulpit to rally for public policies and to share his vision for America with his fellow citizens.

Conflict and Candidate Selection: Game Framing Voter Choice

Political campaigns are often likened to a game typified by conflict. We consider whether using a conflict frame visually emphasizing the contested aspect of partisanship affects candidate support in the 2016 presidential election. Using a nationwide survey experiment (N = 975) that randomly assigns participants to different visual frames depicting politics as conflictual or process-based, we find that participants exposed to the conflict frame show significantly higher odds of supporting Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, while rejecting Hillary Clinton. The conflicting frame also increases self-reported participant anger, which decomposition analysis shows increases support for Trump and Sanders while decreasing it for Clinton (and that we offer as a preliminary finding). Avenues for future research are then considered.