Candidate-Issue Positioning in the Context of Presidential Debates

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of three presidential candidates, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot, who participated in the 1992 presidential debates. The relationships among the three candidates and between each candidate and the issues were examined using semantic network analysis. The results indicate a two-against-one strategy that was issue specific. The candidates teamed up in different pairs, depending on the topic at hand. The results also show the issues that the candidates emphasized most. Specifically, Clinton and Perot had more focused communication consistent with their respective campaign themes of domestic and financial concerns, while Bush did not emphasize any one particular theme. The implications of these differences are discussed, as are the theoretical and practical implications for debater tactics and the strategic use of language for emphasizing political platforms.

New Media/Internet Research Topics of the Association of Internet Researchers

“…Semantic network analysis using CATPAC has been applied to understanding positioning of candidates and issues in presidential debates (Doerfel & Marsh, 2003) and the structure of interests in the International Communication Association (Doerfel & Barnett, 1999), among other topics. These and other prior studies provide the underlying arguments about representing cognition and meaning through content associations.…”

Identifying policy frames through semantic network analysis: an examination of nuclear energy policy across six countries

“…Finally, texts or documents can themselves be used as nodes and tied to the social agents (Hummon and Doreian, 1989;Moody, 2004). Of these three types, the present study focuses on semantic network analysis, primarily due to its capacity to extract salient information from text, to describe relationships among concepts, to analyze underlying meanings in text, and to understand the structure of concept networks (Danowski, 1982(Danowski, , 1993Carley and Palmquist, 1991;Rice & Danowski, 1993;Carley, 1997aCarley, , 1997bJang and Barnett, 1994;Doerfel, 1998;Popping, 2000Popping, , 2003Doerfel and Marsh, 2003;Diesner and Carley, 2004;Doerfel and Connaughton, 2009;Diesner, 2012).…”

“…Since the early 1990s, network analysis of text data has become a widely used method in various academic fields including sociology (Carley, 1993), political science (Maynard, 1997;Kim, Su, & Hong, 2011), information science (Popping, 2003;Diesner and Carley, 2004;Doerfel and Connaughton, 2009), computer science (Diesner, 2012), communications (Rice and Danowski, 1993;Jang and Barnett, 1994;Doerfel, 1998;Doerfel and Barnett, 1999;Kwon et al, 2009;Doerfel and Marsh, 2003;van Atteveldt et al, 2008), conflict management (Young, 1996), poetics (Carley, 1994), and linguistics (Smith, 2003;Smith and Humphreys, 2006). As a result, many different theories and methods have been developed for text-based network analysis and there is no single agreed method and designation of the analysis in the literature (Doerfel, 1998;Diesner, 2012).…”

“…First, concept networks, often called semantic networks, can be extracted (Sowa, 1984;Rice &Danowski, 1993;Jang and Barnett, 1994;Carley, 1997aCarley, , 1997bDoerfel and Barnett, 1999;Popping, 2000Popping, , 2003Smith, 2003;Smith and Humphreys, 2006;Doerfel & Marsh, 2003;Doerfel and Connaughton, 2009;Kwon et al, 2009;Carley et al, 2011). In these networks, nodes (i.e., concepts) represent salient information from a body of text and concepts (i.e., words) are "abstract representation of the information that people conceive in their minds" (Diesner, 2012: 5).…”

“…In other words, semantic network analysis can "generate new, logically implied statements that may not be explicitly stated in texts" (Roberts, 1997: 6). This is more than just "reading between the lines," however, as it uses an objective and quantitative approach to reveal the hidden patterns (Doerfel and Marsh, 2003). Semantic network analysis firstly measures the substructures of the text, before integrating them to induce the main meaning in the text.…”