Over the past two millennia, satire has transformed from a uniquely Greco-Roman theatrical and poetic form into an ambiguous catch-all applied to political and sociocultural commentary, humor, parody, sarcasm and irony. Despite being a subject of study in any number of fields, explications of satire are limited. It is likely for this reason that there are inter- and intra- disciplinary disconnects in theoretical and methodological approach. Given the contemporary proliferation of satirical work, a proper explication of satire will improve text identification, empirical measures, and interdisciplinary collaboration in satirical research. To that end, this paper explicates satire, evaluates contemporary satirical research in the context of this explication, and recommends future research lines to expand the study of a pervasive construct.

Political incivility in the United States is a growing concern among both citizens and scholars. Prior research focusing on incivility among political elites has largely neglected the presidency, however. Thus, popular claims that Donald Trump is particularly uncivil have not yet been subjected to empirical scrutiny vis‐à‐vis presidential norms. The present study undertakes a large‐scale quantitative content analysis of modern presidential communication to provide insight into one key form of incivility: name‐calling. We find that uncivil name‐calling is generally rare in the presidency, and that three presidents—Harry S. Truman, George H. W. Bush, and especially Donald Trump—are outliers in the frequency with which they employ this form of communication.

This article is a piece of a larger line of research supported by the Democracy Fund studying how to communicate about threats to elections in ways that do not dampen people’s desire to vote or make them question the integrity of electoral outcomes. It reports findings from a computerized text analysis of 2,970 open-ended survey responses in the field during the fall of 2018 to the prompt “when people say that elections are rigged, what do you think they mean?” Four key themes emerged in the data: (1) Democrats and Republicans were equally likely to regard electoral outcomes as predetermined, (2) Republicans were twice as likely to be concerned about illegal voting than Democrats, (3) Democrats were slightly more likely to be upset about money in politics than Republicans, and (4) Democrats were twice as likely to be preoccupied with Russian meddling than Republicans. A qualitative analysis of the first theme revealed both similarities across partisans as well as how Democrats focus on how threats to elections benefit people already in power, whereas Republicans worry that elections are threatened by ordinary people cheating. These findings, and the nuances contributing to them, raise new paths for research on communicating about elections without decreasing people’s faith in them.

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