Article Review: Rhetorical Criticism of the 2008 Election, Bloomfield & Katula, 2012

At risk of being self-serving, this week I am reviewing an article that I wrote at my undergraduate university, Northeastern. My reasoning for this is that I will be presenting it at the International Communication Association conference next week in Phoenix, and I believe that walking through the piece with specific attention to limitations and implications will help prepare me. Feedback and comments are always welcome, but on this post in particular.

The purpose of the study was to evaluate the use of values in presidential announcement speeches. Using the three front-runners from the Republican and Democratic parties in 2008, the types of values and their frequencies were coded for compliance with value theory. Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969) outline 5 ways to begin the process of persuasion, named the "premises of agreement". They proposed that values are one of these premises and that values can be split into concrete and abstract categories that correspond with conservative and liberal ideologies, respectively. Matching these ideologies with their current political label, researchers created a list of abstract and concrete values (based off of public opinion polls) to see if politicians were using the "correct" values. Assuming that values are more successful in creating agreement with those of the same ideology, the politicians that are most successful in doing this may see the most success in the campaign.

Using Trent and Friedenberg's 1978 evaluation of announcement speeches as "telescopic" of the campaign, the announcement speech was coded for each candidate. The results showed that Obama, Edwards, and Paul were the only candidates that used a specific type of value more than another, with Obama being the only one that used the "correct" type of value more. McCain, Clinton, and Romney showed no statistically significant preference for either value (alpha level = .05). Paul used significantly more abstract values (liberal) than concrete values (conservative) and Edwards preferred the opposite. Obama significantly favored abstract values, which according to Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca are associated with the liberal ideology, which is his own party affiliation, p = .02.

This results have important implications for how candidates are structuring their campaigns to appeal to voters and creates a quantitative measure for a rhetorical technique and its success.

There are important limitations to the study, which are outlined further in the paper, but will be listed here:

• coding of the speech was done in an "inauthentic" environment
• speech was read, not heard
• there are many factors that determine presidencies, so the narrowing of success to one variable is impossible
• though determining factors and their influence is important for scholars of political rhetoric and communication
• only coded one speech of the campaign instead of a sampling of multiple speeches
• creating a completely inclusive list of values is probably impossible, so this study may be missing other important values that would be influential in forming agreement

This article is to be presented at ICA in its current form and I am happy that another project (about the difficulty in coding for values) is in progress due to this study.