Roderick P Hart
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 112338 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Roderick P Hart |
| PRENOMES | Roderick P |
| SOBRENOME | Hart |
| ASSINATURA | HART R P |
| AFILIAÇÕES | The University of Texas at Austin |
| VERIFICADO | Não |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 49 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 191 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 49 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1974 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2022 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Communication & Media Arts
The field of communication was added to the menu of higher education in the early part of the twentieth century. One hundred years later, it is thriving at colleges and universities throughout the United States and gaining a foothold abroad as well. This essay recounts its growth, surveys its campus manifestations, and explores the challenges it now confronts. In a world of ever-advancing technologies, of evolving forms of online interaction, and…
Why Trump Lost and How? A Rhetorical Explanation
Discovering why the 2020 election turned out as it did will, given the complexities of American politics, take considerable time. Discovering how Trump lost and how Biden won will take longer. This article presents an initial foray in the latter direction by subjecting the rhetoric of the campaign to computerized language analysis via the DICTION program. In doing so, this study is the most recent outgrowth of the Campaign Mapping Project, begun …
The Problem of Lingering Sentiment
This essay distinguishes the chronology of a presidency—how long it lasts in months and years—from the phenomenology of a presidency, what it comes to mean in the eyes of the American people. The case in point is the presidency of Donald Trump, an administration that has somehow “continued” since the time he left office because of the active rhetorical work performed not only by Trump and his supporters but also by the nation's journalists, who h…
Donald Trump and the Return of the Paranoid Style
Here, I examine Donald Trump';s use of what historian Richard Hofstadter has called the paranoid style in American politics, a style that galvanizes audiences by describing how malign forces are working behind the scenes to subvert their will. Although many observers see that style as Trump's own, scholars have not yet tracked its manifestations empirically and systematically. Using DICTION software, I examined a large number of political documen…
Assessing Campaign Quality
This article seeks to start a fresh conversation about how political campaigns are best judged. Surprisingly, there has been comparatively little research on this topic, with most scholars operating on implicit norms of what a good campaign looks like, featuring such republican criteria as ballot integrity, regime support, cognitive gains, press oversight and policy signaling. Focusing on the 2016 presidential campaign, I offer a contrarian set o…
The People's Voice During the 2016 Presidential Campaign
This study examines the 2016 presidential campaign by comparing the voice of the people with that of the press and the political establishment. By systematically collecting some 5,000 texts (political speeches, ads, and debates alongside print and broadcast coverage) during the campaign and comparing them with 1,200 letters to the editor written in 12 small American cities, an overview of the nation's quadrennial dialogue was made possible. By al…
The Third Voice of American Politics
This article describes the people's voice in American politics by contrasting it to those of the nation's leaders and the working press. Based on a content analysis of all three actors (with letters to the editor serving as a stand‐in for the citizenry), we find the people situated midway between politicians and the press. Citizen‐writers show greater rhetorical optimism than media operatives but not as much as White House aspirants. Citizens als…
The Blended Language of Partisanship in the 2012 Presidential Campaign
Here, we track the language patterns of Mitt Romney and other Republican candidates during 2008 and 2012 and contrast them with their Democratic counterparts to better understand the language of partisanship in the U.S. We employ DICTION ( www.dictionsoftware.com ), an automated text-analysis tool, to process some 8,000 campaign documents. We find (a) that Mitt Romney was an unconventional Republican in 2012 (but not in 2008); (b) that Romney emp…
The rhetoric of Islamic activism
Given the paucity of understanding in the West regarding Middle Eastern discourse, this study provides a careful description of Islamic activist rhetoric. Using DICTION, a program that calculates some 40 different stylistic variables and 5 master variables, we compared the rhetoric of Western politicians, protestors, preachers, and pundits to that of Islamic activists. Relative to the West, the Islamic sample was relatively hopeful and communal, …
The Geo‐Social Presidency
This article respects Coe and Neumann's call for a unified data set for textual studies of the U.S. presidency, but it objects to its (1) national, (2) formal, and (3) issue‐based characteristics. Coe and Neumann's data set dismissed the ceremonial dimensions of the modern presidency; its partisan‐political events; its dialogue with the nation's press; and, worst of all, the local and regional encounters between the president and the American peo…
Tracking the Language of Space and Time, 1948-2008
This article explores how contemporary historians can avail themselves of quantitative approaches to examine how elusive concepts like ‘time’ and ‘space’ have been used in the public domain. By making use of specifically designed programs, historians can use digital tools to harness an unprecedented mass of information. This is a particularly important methodological innovation at a time of rapidly expanding data: news, speeches, and commentary a…
Words and Their Ways in Campaign '08
This study reports certain lexical patterns produced during the general election of campaign 2008 by Senators John McCain and Barack Obama. As such, it continues a series of tracings begun a dozen years ago under the rubric of the Campaign Mapping Project. This is largely a descriptive project employing computerized language analysis, making specific use of the DICTION 5.0 program. The authors examine some 700 speech passages delivered during the…
The Fog of War
The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, directed by Errol Morris." , 24(2), pp. 235–236
Communication, Politics, and the Notions of Martin Spencer
This essay calls attention to the work of sociologist Martin Spencer, who once offered an uncommon understanding of political communications in the United States. According to Spencer, public discourse not only propels action but constitutes action in and of itself on occasion. This means that political rhetoric can have both an injunctive effect on political actors and can also stand as a kind of completed “action” in its own right. The importan…
The Evolution of Candidate Bush
This article examines George W. Bush's campaign rhetoric in both 2000 and 2004 and compares his style to that of his predecessors. Using DICTION, a computerized language analysis program, the study finds that Bush was quite tentative during the 2000 campaign and eschewed use of a narrative style. By the time his reelection campaign began, however, Bush had dramatically increased his hortatory and narrative scores, meaning he had found both an imp…
Verbal Certainty in American Politics
This article reexamines the first author's work over the last three decades in the area of presidential rhetoric, focusing particularly on verbal certainty—the extent to which a speaker depends on resolute and totalistic language. The study then explores the first three years of the George W. Bush presidency along this dimension. Although verbal certainty has declined across presidential administrations during the past 50 years, the Bush presiden…
Imagining the American People
Journal Article Imagining the American People: Strategies for Building Political Community Get access Roderick P. Hart, Roderick P. Hart 1Roderick P. Hart holds the Shivers Chair in communication and government at the University of Texas at Austin, where William Jennings and Mary Dixson are doctoral students. A previous version of this paper was presented at the annual conference of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, Sept…
Imagining the American People
This study examined how the American electorate has been described by political campaigners, the mass media, and voters themselves between 1948 and 2000. Using a large (digitized) database of campaign addresses, news stories, and letters to the editor, the authors isolated 2,924 uses of the phrase, “the American people.” By examining these phrases for descriptions of the roles, actions, qualities, and circumstances of the people, and by noting th…
Why Do They Talk That Way? A Research Agenda for the Presidency
Why Do They Talk That Way? A Research Agenda for the Presidency
This article surveys the available explanations for why presidential discourse adopts the patterns it does and then suggests new ways of studying the presidency in the future. The article's operat‐ingpremises are these: (1) presidential scholars have been insufficiently attentive to theory building in the past, (2) the available ontological explanations for presidential discourse should be reinterrogated, (3) scholars need to go beyond traditiona…
The American People in Crisis
This study examines how images of the American electorate were deployed after the 11 September 2001 terrorism incident and during the Clinton impeachment. Transcripts of congressional proceedings, news coverage, and presidential campaign addresses were analyzed to determine how the phrase the American people was used during these two crises and in unrelated presidential campaign speeches. The analysis considered the roles, actions, qualities, and…
We the People
What would the American people say to one another when a representative sample of them collected in the same living room for a weekend? Stalwart that he is, James Fishkin proposed to find out. He could not afford to bring all of the American people to Austin, Texas, for the weekend of January 18, 1996, but he did coax 466 of them into deliberating about foreign policy, the national economy, and family relations, and then formalizing their opinion…
Constructing the Electorate during Presidential Campaigns
This study examines how the American electorate has been described by political campaigners between 1948 and 1996. Using a database of some five hundred speeches given on the stump or during national political broadcasts, the authors isolated 898 uses of the phrase “the American people.” By examining these phrases for descriptions of the roles, actions, qualities, and circumstances of the people, and by noting their time orientation and the force…
Accepting the Political Mantle
Political Debate
Although presidential debates have been studied extensively, few truly basic, generic questions have been raised. The following study does so by asking (a) What textual features distinguish debates from other types of campaign messages? (b) How have such factors as time, format, party, and incumbency affected political debates? and (c) How did the 1996 debates relate to such trends? In answering these questions the authors present findings from t…
An Exploration of Deception as a Communication Construct
Even though most of us lie from time to time, it is really quite surprising how little is known about such behaviors. Through controlled observation and laboratory testing, this study attempted to determine what verbal and nonverbal behaviors were characteristic of intentionally deceptive communicators. Seventy-six videotaped interviews provided a data base for the analysis of 32 dependent measures. In addition to analyses of specific behavioral …
The sound of leadership
Attitudes toward communication and the assessment of rhetorical sensitivity
This series of studies operationalized the concept of rhetorical sensitivity first discussed by Hart and Burks in 1972. A measuring instrument (RHETSEN) was developed and the attitudes‐toward‐communication held by several thousand individuals were thereby assessed. RHETSEN was found to have sufficient reliability and validity. When a national sample of college students responded to RHETSEN, it appeared that their feelings about encoding messages …
Donald Trump and the Return of the Paranoid Style
Here, I examine Donald Trump';s use of what historian Richard Hofstadter has called the paranoid style in American politics, a style that galvanizes audiences by describing how malign forces are working behind the scenes to subvert their will. Although many observers see that style as Trump's own, scholars have not yet tracked its manifestations empirically and systematically. Using DICTION software, I examined a large number of political documen…
The American People in Crisis
This study examines how images of the American electorate were deployed after the 11 September 2001 terrorism incident and during the Clinton impeachment. Transcripts of congressional proceedings, news coverage, and presidential campaign addresses were analyzed to determine how the phrase the American people was used during these two crises and in unrelated presidential campaign speeches. The analysis considered the roles, actions, qualities, and…
Political Debate
Although presidential debates have been studied extensively, few truly basic, generic questions have been raised. The following study does so by asking (a) What textual features distinguish debates from other types of campaign messages? (b) How have such factors as time, format, party, and incumbency affected political debates? and (c) How did the 1996 debates relate to such trends? In answering these questions the authors present findings from t…
Verbal Certainty in American Politics
This article reexamines the first author's work over the last three decades in the area of presidential rhetoric, focusing particularly on verbal certainty—the extent to which a speaker depends on resolute and totalistic language. The study then explores the first three years of the George W. Bush presidency along this dimension. Although verbal certainty has declined across presidential administrations during the past 50 years, the Bush presiden…
Evolution of presidential news coverage
This study is the second of two reporting on how the American presidency has been rhetorically constructed for the nation's citizens by the mass media between 1945 and 1985. These research papers examined 412 Time magazine articles on the presidency, keying on such matters as how that magazine documented its reportage, which presidential qualities, behaviors, and problems it emphasized, and how Time used language strategies to describe and evalua…
Absolutism and situation
This study is an initial attempt at rhetorical biography and details an automated language analysis procedure for assessing verbal absolution. The study proceeds deductively by first positing five features of the “public personality” of Richard M. Nixon and then using these constructs to interpret certain stylistic probings made of his rhetoric. The results of the investigation indicate that Nixon's verbal absolutism was (1) less pronounced than …
Why Trump Lost and How? A Rhetorical Explanation
Discovering why the 2020 election turned out as it did will, given the complexities of American politics, take considerable time. Discovering how Trump lost and how Biden won will take longer. This article presents an initial foray in the latter direction by subjecting the rhetoric of the campaign to computerized language analysis via the DICTION program. In doing so, this study is the most recent outgrowth of the Campaign Mapping Project, begun …
Rhetorical features of newscasts about the president
This study details the general verbal and visual characteristics of network news coverage of presidential speech‐making between 1969 and 1978. It is argued that a persuasion‐based model of such newscasts best accounts for the phenomena observed and that other models of media bias are less heuristic than the rhetorical approach. Forty‐five newscasts were analyzed from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective. Results indicate that president…
A Commentary on Popular Assumptions About Political Communication
Journal Article A Commentary on Popular Assumptions about Political Communication Roderick P. Hart Roderick P. Hart 1Roderick P. Hart (Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University, 1970) is professor of speech communication, University of Texas, Austin, Texas 78712 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Human Communication Research, Volume 8, Issue 4, June 1982, Pages 366–379, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.1982.tb0…
The Evolution of Candidate Bush
This article examines George W. Bush's campaign rhetoric in both 2000 and 2004 and compares his style to that of his predecessors. Using DICTION, a computerized language analysis program, the study finds that Bush was quite tentative during the 2000 campaign and eschewed use of a narrative style. By the time his reelection campaign began, however, Bush had dramatically increased his hortatory and narrative scores, meaning he had found both an imp…
Easy Citizenship
This article argues that television has reduced the burdens of citizenship for the average American and that that reduction is dangerous. Television does all of this by overwhelming viewers with the sights and sounds of governmental life and by supersaturating them with political information. All too often, however, this tumult creates in viewers a sense of activity rather than genuine civic involvement. In addition, television constantly tells t…
The Third Voice of American Politics
This article describes the people's voice in American politics by contrasting it to those of the nation's leaders and the working press. Based on a content analysis of all three actors (with letters to the editor serving as a stand‐in for the citizenry), we find the people situated midway between politicians and the press. Citizen‐writers show greater rhetorical optimism than media operatives but not as much as White House aspirants. Citizens als…
Words and Their Ways in Campaign '08
This study reports certain lexical patterns produced during the general election of campaign 2008 by Senators John McCain and Barack Obama. As such, it continues a series of tracings begun a dozen years ago under the rubric of the Campaign Mapping Project. This is largely a descriptive project employing computerized language analysis, making specific use of the DICTION 5.0 program. The authors examine some 700 speech passages delivered during the…
Why Do They Talk That Way? A Research Agenda for the Presidency
This article surveys the available explanations for why presidential discourse adopts the patterns it does and then suggests new ways of studying the presidency in the future. The article's operat‐ingpremises are these: (1) presidential scholars have been insufficiently attentive to theory building in the past, (2) the available ontological explanations for presidential discourse should be reinterrogated, (3) scholars need to go beyond traditiona…
Constructing the Electorate during Presidential Campaigns
This study examines how the American electorate has been described by political campaigners between 1948 and 1996. Using a database of some five hundred speeches given on the stump or during national political broadcasts, the authors isolated 898 uses of the phrase “the American people.” By examining these phrases for descriptions of the roles, actions, qualities, and circumstances of the people, and by noting their time orientation and the force…
Politics and the virtual event
The article characterizes the hearings conducted by the Senate Judiciary Committee in October 1991 relative to Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas as a virtual event. That is, the event was a highly dramatic encounter arising unexpectedly that possessed the human qualities needed to attract media attention but that effected no immediate, statutory changes in the polity. The article isolates four characteristics of the virtual event—generic density, he…
An unquiet desperation
This paper reports the rhetorical aftermath discovered when a pressure group consistently failed to achieve its end. The rhetoric examined is that of "popular" atheists in the United States. Psychologically speaking, ostracism seems to cause such persons to exhibit lack of confidence, confusion, anger, and desperation. These psychological states translate into (1) rhetorical dependency, (2) the development of an inappropriate rhetorical philosoph…
The Problem of Lingering Sentiment
This essay distinguishes the chronology of a presidency—how long it lasts in months and years—from the phenomenology of a presidency, what it comes to mean in the eyes of the American people. The case in point is the presidency of Donald Trump, an administration that has somehow “continued” since the time he left office because of the active rhetorical work performed not only by Trump and his supporters but also by the nation's journalists, who h…
The rhetoric of Islamic activism
Given the paucity of understanding in the West regarding Middle Eastern discourse, this study provides a careful description of Islamic activist rhetoric. Using DICTION, a program that calculates some 40 different stylistic variables and 5 master variables, we compared the rhetoric of Western politicians, protestors, preachers, and pundits to that of Islamic activists. Relative to the West, the Islamic sample was relatively hopeful and communal, …
Why Do They Talk That Way? A Research Agenda for the Presidency
Launching our new journal
1993). Launching our new journal: Greetings from the sponsoring political communication groups. Political Communication: Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 3-5
Verbal Style and the Presidency
An Exploration of Deception as a Communication Construct
Even though most of us lie from time to time, it is really quite surprising how little is known about such behaviors. Through controlled observation and laboratory testing, this study attempted to determine what verbal and nonverbal behaviors were characteristic of intentionally deceptive communicators. Seventy-six videotaped interviews provided a data base for the analysis of 32 dependent measures. In addition to analyses of specific behavioral …
Absolutism and situation
This study is an initial attempt at rhetorical biography and details an automated language analysis procedure for assessing verbal absolution. The study proceeds deductively by first positing five features of the “public personality” of Richard M. Nixon and then using these constructs to interpret certain stylistic probings made of his rhetoric. The results of the investigation indicate that Nixon's verbal absolutism was (1) less pronounced than …
An unquiet desperation
This paper reports the rhetorical aftermath discovered when a pressure group consistently failed to achieve its end. The rhetoric examined is that of "popular" atheists in the United States. Psychologically speaking, ostracism seems to cause such persons to exhibit lack of confidence, confusion, anger, and desperation. These psychological states translate into (1) rhetorical dependency, (2) the development of an inappropriate rhetorical philosoph…
Who Are the Unchurched
Attitudes toward communication and the assessment of rhetorical sensitivity
This series of studies operationalized the concept of rhetorical sensitivity first discussed by Hart and Burks in 1972. A measuring instrument (RHETSEN) was developed and the attitudes‐toward‐communication held by several thousand individuals were thereby assessed. RHETSEN was found to have sufficient reliability and validity. When a national sample of college students responded to RHETSEN, it appeared that their feelings about encoding messages …
Religion and the Rhetoric of the Mass Media
A Rhetorical Profile of Religious News
Roderick P. Hart, Kathleen J. Turner, Ralph E. Knupp; A Rhetorical Profile of Religious News: Time, 1947–1976, Journal of Communication, Volume 31, Issue 3
A Commentary on Popular Assumptions About Political Communication
Journal Article A Commentary on Popular Assumptions about Political Communication Roderick P. Hart Roderick P. Hart 1Roderick P. Hart (Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University, 1970) is professor of speech communication, University of Texas, Austin, Texas 78712 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Human Communication Research, Volume 8, Issue 4, June 1982, Pages 366–379, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.1982.tb0…
After the Dust Settles
Journal Article After the Dust Settles Get access Roderick P. Hart Roderick P. Hart Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Human Communication Research, Volume 8, Issue 4, June 1982, Pages 388–389, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.1982.tb00678.x Published: 17 March 2006
Rhetorical features of newscasts about the president
This study details the general verbal and visual characteristics of network news coverage of presidential speech‐making between 1969 and 1978. It is argued that a persuasion‐based model of such newscasts best accounts for the phenomena observed and that other models of media bias are less heuristic than the rhetorical approach. Forty‐five newscasts were analyzed from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective. Results indicate that president…
Verbal Style and the Presidency
The politics of communication studies
Verbal Style and the Presidency
The sound of leadership
Some Footnotes on the Role of Public Communication in Incumbent Politics
(1987). Some Footnotes on the Role of Public Communication in Incumbent Politics. Annals of the International Communication Association: Vol. 10, Communication Yearbook 10, pp. 117-145
News That Matters
Evolution of presidential news coverage
This study is the second of two reporting on how the American presidency has been rhetorically constructed for the nation's citizens by the mass media between 1945 and 1985. These research papers examined 412 Time magazine articles on the presidency, keying on such matters as how that magazine documented its reportage, which presidential qualities, behaviors, and problems it emphasized, and how Time used language strategies to describe and evalua…
The Mindscape of the Presidency
Roderick P. Hart, Deborah Smith-Howell, John Llewellyn; The Mindscape of the Presidency: Time Magazine, 1945–1985, Journal of Communication, Volume 41, Iss
Is there an American public
This paper is an exchange of correspondence that debates the empirical and critical usefulness of the construct known as “the American public.” Because that construct is often used in mass media research, but used stipulatively rather than self‐consciously for the most part, its theoretical worthiness is explored here in some detail. By approaching the topic from different vantage points, the authors hope to stimulate further scholarly examinatio…
The rebuttal round
Launching our new journal
1993). Launching our new journal: Greetings from the sponsoring political communication groups. Political Communication: Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 3-5
Politics and the virtual event
The article characterizes the hearings conducted by the Senate Judiciary Committee in October 1991 relative to Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas as a virtual event. That is, the event was a highly dramatic encounter arising unexpectedly that possessed the human qualities needed to attract media attention but that effected no immediate, statutory changes in the polity. The article isolates four characteristics of the virtual event—generic density, he…
Political styles and political feelings
Robert Hariman. Political Style: The Artistry of Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, xii + 259. Roderick P. Hart. Seducing America: How Television Charms the Modern Voter. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. viii + 230 pp
Easy Citizenship
This article argues that television has reduced the burdens of citizenship for the average American and that that reduction is dangerous. Television does all of this by overwhelming viewers with the sights and sounds of governmental life and by supersaturating them with political information. All too often, however, this tumult creates in viewers a sense of activity rather than genuine civic involvement. In addition, television constantly tells t…
Political Debate
Although presidential debates have been studied extensively, few truly basic, generic questions have been raised. The following study does so by asking (a) What textual features distinguish debates from other types of campaign messages? (b) How have such factors as time, format, party, and incumbency affected political debates? and (c) How did the 1996 debates relate to such trends? In answering these questions the authors present findings from t…
Political science (41 obras) · Sociology (40 obras) · Law (35 obras) · Politics (33 obras) · Law (24 obras) · Rhetoric and Communication Studies (24 obras) · Media studies (22 obras) · Psychology (17 obras) · Linguistics (16 obras) · Media Studies and Communication (15 obras)