Mitchell S. McKinney

Introduction Political Information Efficacy and Young Voters

With young voters reporting lower levels of political knowledge and information than older voters, and with young citizens often attributing their abstention from voting to their lack of political ...

A Gendered Influence in Campaign Debates? Analysis of Mixed‐gender United States Senate and Gubernatorial Debates

Throughout the literature much of the research on political campaign debates has focused on presidential debates and has largely ignored non‐presidential debates, particularly those featuring candidates competing in mixed‐gender races. The purpose of this study is to draw attention to these non‐presidential debates and particularly those in which gender may play a pivotal role. Through our analysis of four debates—two gubernatorial and two U.S. Senate debates—we advance the notion of debatestyle as a useful analytic scheme to examine the verbal content of female and male candidate debate dialogue. While few differences in female and male debatestyles ultimately emerged, results of the current study indicate that female and male political candidates, when engaged in debate, adopt a strategy of gendered adaptiveness that offers important contributions to both research on political debates as well as research on gender and politics.

Live-Tweeting a Presidential Primary Debate: Exploring New Political Conversations

Twitter offers a function called live-tweeting that allows users to communicate about events with each other in real time. This study examines the use of live-tweeting during a 2012 Republican Primary Debate by examining the 181,780 tweets posted during the nationally televised debate. Live-tweeting offers users an opportunity to engage in public conversation about political events and thus potentially influence the framing of what occurred. Our study examines whether citizens utilize the opportunity to contribute to the political narrative or if elite users dominate political conversations through an analysis of tweets used by both groups. Findings show that there were very few differences between the elite and nonelite social media conversations and that elite users views were spread farther than nonelite views.

Social Watching a 2012 Republican Presidential Primary Debate

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.

Do Presidential Debates Matter? Examining a Decade of Campaign Debate Effects

This study responds to The Racine Groups (2002) call for campaign debate research that explores “the trans-campaign effects of debates on such matters as voting behavior, image formation, and attitude change” (p. 199). Our analysis of debate effects from 2000 to 2012 provides a number of important insights into how presidential campaign debates function in different campaign contexts. Specifically, we examine debate effects across multiple campaign periods, including analysis of the presidential election cycles and debates in 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012; and we also explore campaign contexts in which incumbents are seeking reelection (2004 and 2012) as well as “open” races with no incumbent president engaged in general election debates. Finally, our analysis allows for comparative assessments across different types of debates as we include viewer responses to both Democrat and Republican primary and general election debates, as well as vice presidential debates. Overall, our findings support existing presidential debate research, provide a greater understanding of specific debate effects, and also raise a number of intriguing questions for future research.

Rocking the Youth Vote Through Debate: examining the effects of a citizen versus journalist controlled debate on civic engagement

During the 2003–4 US presidential primary campaign, the national youth vote organization Rock the Vote partnered with CNN to sponsor a nationally-televised debate where eight Democratic presidential candidates participated in a town hall forum responding to questions posed by young citizens. In fact, this was the first-ever televised presidential debate (primary or general election) devoted exclusively to the concerns of young voters. The current study examines the effects of viewing this debate, and particularly the debates influence on young citizens’ “normative” democratic attitudes and values. To help us better understand how the Rock the Vote/CNN debate may have affected young voters, we compare reactions to the youth-targeted debate to young citizens’ responses when viewing a traditional candidate debate in which journalists questioned the candidates. Results suggest that the youth-targeted Rock the Vote/CNN debate dialogue was framed in ways that encouraged greater identification between young citizens and the candidates, contributing to a heighten level of political efficacy among young voters.

Tweeting during Presidential Debates: Effect on Candidate Evaluations and Debate Attitudes

This study examined the effects of tweeting while watching a presidential debate (live-tweeting) during the 2012 U.S. election. We examined candidate evaluations and debate attitudes for participants who did and did not tweet while watching a presidential or vice presidential debate. We found that tweeting while watching a debate was related to participants reporting more favorable attitudes about Barack Obama, paying more attention to the debate, and perceiving debates to be more important. Live-tweeting a debate was not related to enjoying the debate more. Overall, our results indicate that live-tweeting a televised political event can result in different effects than simply watching a debate and that live-tweeting debates is an activity driven by engagement with and thoughtful processing of debate content rather than primarily about fun or passing time.

Let the People Speak The Public’s Agenda and Presidential Town Hall Debates

This study argues that a “devolution” of the presidential town hall debate as public sphere has occurred, whereby every 4 years citizens’ freedom to participate in their debate—as they see fit—has been seriously restricted. The primary purpose of this study is to examine how well the town hall presidential debate, particularly in its current form, addresses issues of greatest concern to the American public. Specifically, to test how well the dialogue of a town hall debate matches the public’s campaign issue agenda, as well as examine possible changes over time, analysis compares the issues discussed in both the 2004 and 1992 town hall debates to the agenda of issues that citizens claimed were most important to them. Results suggest that as candidates have gained greater control over the town hall’s structure and resulting dialogue, the ability of this forum to reflect a citizen’s issue agenda has greatly diminished.

To Unite and Divide: The Polarizing Effect of Presidential Debates

This study analyzes the effect of viewing a presidential campaign debate on political polarization. The results of quasi-experimental debate studies of all presidential general election debates in 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012 as well as vice presidential debates in 2008 and 2012 demonstrate a consistent effect: Viewing a debate increased political polarization. However, predebate levels of polarization moderated this effect such that those viewers with very little polarization experienced the most significant increase and those who were highly polarized prior to viewing a debate experienced no significant change. Overall, our findings contribute to a growing body of research on the polarizing effects of campaign communication and raise important questions about how these effects should be interpreted in future research.

Who Framed Sarah Palin? Viewer Reactions to the 2008 Vice Presidential Debate

This study analyzes viewer assessments of Sara Palin’s vice presidential debate performance. Specifically, a national sample of debate viewers evaluated Palin and her vice presidential opponent Joe Biden on both image and issue measures before and after viewing their debate performance. We argue that the attendant media attention surrounding Palin before her debate performance—mostly negative in tone—framed Palin as unfit for office and created expectations that she would fail in her debate with Joe Biden. On several measures, however, Palin’s debate performance actually exceeded the low-bar of expectations that had been set, thus benefiting her in terms of viewers’ assessments of her debate performance.