Abstract
This chapter takes an integrative, multi-methodological approach to the analysis of political attacks during presidential debates. Using continuous response measures (CRM) recorded from viewers in real time during the third and final US presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, we identify an equal number of Trump’s character and issue attacks on Clinton. We then analyze the mean differences in CRM response to these episodes and subject each segment to nonverbal coding to determine candidate display behavior at the time of the incident. Results indicate that viewers, regardless of political party affiliation, penalize Trump more for character attacks than issue attacks. Independents show the most aversion to attacks overall. Several instances of Trump standing behind and appearing to “hover over” Clinton from the second debate were then shown to focus groups to probe the boundaries of norm violations and discern how nonverbal displays exhibited by Trump intensified the perceived aggression of his verbal attacks.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Analysis of news coverage of debates and other political appearances has documented how female candidates face further backlash through reporting that often overemphasizes their purported aggressive and nonstereotypical behaviors (Gidengil & Everitt, 2000; Ross & Comrie, 2012).
- 2.
Defense messages constitute the third persuasive strategy in Benoit’s typology. Defenses (mostly against attacks just leveled) are designed to accomplish two basic things. First, they blunt or refute the attack on the candidate and, second, they may help to restore a candidate’s desirability (Benoit, 2003). But as with attacks, defense statements come with drawbacks—they can make a candidate look defensive and weak, and they bring attention to, and might actually inform voters about, the attack itself.
- 3.
Topics of Trump’s issue attacks included the Second Amendment (0:10:35–0:11:20), immigration (0:17:16–0:18:00), NATO (0:36:34–0:37:18), and the security situation in Mosul (1:13:51–1:14:09). Trump’s character attacks on Clinton featured references to the economy (0:45:15–0:46:13), release of Clinton campaign emails (0:49:18–0:50:42), the security situation in Mosul (1:14:11–1:14:49), and personal insults (1:28:42–1:28:50).
- 4.
A repertoire of behaviors famously mocked by Alec Baldwin in an ongoing, and popular, series of Saturday Night Live skits on the NBC television network (Poniewozik, 2016).
References
Beattie, G. (2016a). Rethinking body language: How hand movements reveal hidden thoughts. London: Routledge.
Beattie, G. (2016b). How Donald Trump bullies with his body language. In D. Lilleker, D. Jackson, E. Thorsen, & A. Veneti (Eds.), US election analysis 2016: Media, voters, and the campaign (p. 30). Centre for Politics and Media Research, Bournemouth University, UK. http://bit.ly/USElectionAnalysis2016-Lilleker_Thorsen_Jackson_Veneti-v1
Benoit, W. L. (2003). Campaign 2000: A functional analysis of presidential campaign discourse. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Benoit, W. L. (2007). Communication in political campaigns. New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Benoit, W. L. (2014). Political election debates: Informing voters about policy and character. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Berke, R. L. (2000, October 18). Bush and Gore, in last debate, stage vigorous give-and-take. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/18/us/2000-campaign-overview-bush-gore-last-debate-stage-vigorous-give-take.html
Berke, R. L., & Sack, K. (2000, October 11). In debate 2, microscope focuses on Gore. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/11/us/the-2000-campaign-the-debates-in-debate-2-microscope-focuses-on-gore.html
Bucy, E. P. (2011). Nonverbal communication, emotion, and political evaluation. In E. Konijn, K. Koveling, & C. von Scheve (Eds.), Handbook of emotions and mass media (pp. 195–220). New York, NY: Routledge.
Bucy, E. P. (2016). The look of losing, then and now: Nixon, Obama, and nonverbal indicators of opportunity lost. American Behavioral Scientist, 60(14), 1772–1798.
Bucy, E. P. (2017). Media biopolitics: The emergence of a subfield. In S. A. Peterson & A. Somit (Eds.), Handbook of biology and politics (pp. 284–303). Cheltenham, UK: Edwin Elgar Publishing.
Bucy, E. P., & Gong, Z. H. (2016). Image bite analysis of presidential debates. In R. X. Browning (Ed.), Exploring the C-SPAN archives: Advancing the research agenda (pp. 45–75). West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press.
Bucy, E. P., & Grabe, M. E. (2008). “Happy warriors” revisited: Hedonic and agonic display repertoires of presidential candidates on the evening news. Politics and the Life Sciences, 27(1), 78–98.
Bucy, E. P., & Stewart, P. A. (2018). The personalization of campaigns: Nonverbal cues in presidential debates. In W. R. Thompson (Gen. Ed.), Oxford research encyclopedia of politics. Oxford Research Encyclopedias Series. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.52
Burgoon, J. K., & Hale, J. L. (1988). Nonverbal expectancy violations: Model elaboration and application to immediacy behaviors. Communication Monographs, 55(1), 58–79.
Cicero, M. T. (1970). Cicero on oratory and orators (J. S. Watson, Ed.). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Clinton, H. R. (2017). What happened. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
Cupach, W. R., & Spitzberg, B. H. (1983). Trait versus state: A comparison of dispositional and situational measures of interpersonal communication competence. Western Journal of Speech Communication, 47(4), 364–379.
Druckman, D., Rozelle, R. M., & Baxter, J. C. (1982). Nonverbal communication: Survey, theory, and research. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Geer, J. G. (2006). In defense of negativity: Attack ads in presidential campaigns. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Germond, J. W., & Witcover, J. (1989). Whose broad stripes and bright stars? The trivial pursuit of the presidency, 1988. New York, NY: Warner Books.
Gong, Z. H., & Bucy, E. P. (2016). When style obscures substance: Visual attention to display appropriateness in the 2012 presidential debates. Communication Monographs, 83(3), 349–372.
Grabe, M. E., & Bucy, E. P. (2009). Image bite politics: News and the visual framing of elections. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Hunt, A. R. (2016, January 31). Letter from Washington; The rise and fall of the Bush campaign. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/us/politics/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-bush-campaign.html
Knapp, M. L., Hall, J. A., & Horgan, T. G. (2014). Nonverbal communication in human interaction (8th ed.). Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage.
Lombard, M., Snyder-Duch, J. S., & Bracken, C. C. (2002). Content analysis in mass communication: Assessment and reporting of intercoder reliability. Human Communication Research, 28(4), 587–604.
Lucas, D., & Benson, C. (1929). The historical trend in negative appeals in advertising. Journal of Applied Psychology, 13(4), 346–356.
Masters, R. D. (2001). Cognitive neuroscience, emotion, and leadership. In J. H. Kuklinski (Ed.), Citizens and politics: Perspectives from political psychology (pp. 68–102). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Masters, R. D., Sullivan, D. G., Feola, A., & McHugo, G. J. (1987). Television coverage of candidates’ display behavior during the 1984 Democratic primaries in the United States. International Political Science Review, 8(2), 121–130.
Masters, R. D., Sullivan, D. G., Lanzetta, J. T., McHugo, G. J., & Englis, B. G. (1986). The facial displays of leaders: Toward an ethology of human politics. Journal of Social & Biological Structures, 9(4), 319–343.
Mutz, D. (2007). Effects of “in your face” television discourse on perceptions of a legitimate opposition. American Political Science Review, 101(4), 621–635.
Poniewozik, J. (2016, November 6). For ‘S.N.L.,’ Clinton-Trump has been a blessing and a curse. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/07/arts/television/for-snl-clinton-trump-has-been-a-blessing-and-a-curse.html
Reinemann, C., & Maurer, M. (2005). Unifying or polarizing? Short-term effects and post-debate consequences of different rhetorical strategies in televised debates. Journal of Communication, 55(4), 775–794.
Schroeder, A. (2008). Presidential debates: Fifty years of high-risk TV. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Shah, D. V., Hanna, A., Bucy, E. P., Wells, C., & Quevedo, V. (2015). The power of television images in a social media age: Linking biobehavioral and computational approaches via the “second screen.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 659(1), 225–245.
West, D. M. (2017). Air wars: Television advertising and social media in election campaigns, 1952–2016 (7th ed.). Washington, DC: CQ Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Appendix
Appendix
Focus group protocol: Clip-specific questions
-
What stood out to you in this clip? Explain why.
-
What did the candidates get right here—how did Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump exceed expectations?
-
What did the candidates get wrong here—what concerns do you have about Clinton or Trump?
-
Did either of the candidates act inappropriately during this clip—when? Please explain.
-
-
Do you think either of the candidates’ poll standings were affected by this episode?
-
What impact does this kind of information have on your willingness to support Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump? Will you do anything more for them now, anything less?
Anything else you would like to add?
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bucy, E.P., Gong, Z.H. (2018). In/Appropriate Aggression in Presidential Debate: How Trump’s Nonverbal Displays Intensified Verbal Norm Violations in 2016. In: Senior, C. (eds) The Facial Displays of Leaders. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94535-4_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94535-4_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-94534-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-94535-4
eBook Packages: Behavioral Science and PsychologyBehavioral Science and Psychology (R0)