Do Presidents Lead or Follow the Public? Using Evidence From Rhetoric to Assess Presidential Strategy

I seek to address a fundamental question about the contemporary presidency: Do presidents lead public opinion, or do they mainly follow it? The question is difficult to examine systematically, partly because it is problematic to compare presidential policies with poll results systematically. Additionally, most have approached this question using a very narrow conception of public opinion. The proposal here is for an approach to address the question by relying solely on a content analysis of presidential rhetoric. My thesis is that public leadership can be gauged by analyzing the content of what the president says in his public addresses. Instead of analyzing polls, and presidents' responses to them, I employ a method of characterizing the strategies of speeches on the basis of a content analysis of the speech alone. These speeches are coded for features of rhetoric that reveal efforts to move opinion against resistance: acknowledgement of public fears or opposition, recognition of costs or risks, mentions of objections or counter-arguments, references to support from experts, elaboration of causal claims, and appeals to duty. Conceptually, this approach will bring us closer to identifying public leadership, as it is built upon a model of public opinion that emphasizes the process of communication between elites and masses. The result is a new tool for examining the conditions under which leadership is more or less likely to occur.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Political Science

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2015

Author dc:creator

• Cunion, William E.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Paul J. Quirk

• Political Science, General

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

(MiAaPQ)AAI3101822

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/82560