For years, Texas has experienced significant growth and demographic change that has slowly altered the balance of Texas’s political power. This thesis argues that due to a series of unlikely developments, the scales are tipping in favor of the Democrats much earlier than projected. As a result of demographic changes, Donald Trump, and the Tea Party faction of the Texas GOP, the Democrats may be able to win Texas’s electoral votes, as well as the 2018 Texas gubernatorial race.

Donald Trump’s candidacy for president has led to a substantial debate not only in the Republican party but also in the media. Using a two-dimensional theoretical model consisting of the left-right scale and the GAL-TAN scale, this study aims to review the conflict that Donald Trump’s campaign has led to in the Republican party. Using content analysis, a range of statements from Republicans have been analyzed, aiming to answer the following questions; How do the republican political actors contend for or against Donald Trump’s candidacy? and: what material or post-material values are linked to these arguments and statements? This study shows that the conflict following Donald Trump’s candidacy can mainly be placed in the post-material conflict dimension, even though some left-right arguments can also be found in the studied material. The political actors supporting Trump’s candidacy are mainly using arguments possible to place in the TAN-part of the post-material conflict dimension, whereas the actors criticizing Trump are mainly using arguments possible to place in the GAL-part.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump ran highly controversial campaigns in the 2016 Presidential Election, which then leaves us with the question of what impact is this having on the current economy? Prior analysis of political influence on the stock market tells us that isolating political impact on the stock market is nearly impossible. However, there are clearly defined 4-year cycles in stock prices that seem to correspond with election years. In this paper, I create my own index of stocks in the four major U.S. industries and measure both day-to-day and intraday volatility in stock prices across three comparable time periods: the year leading up to the 2016 election, all election years excluding the 2016, and all non-election years. I found that the 2016 election year was significantly less volatile than both prior election years as well as non-election years, suggesting that the 2015-2016 election year was not a closely contested race.

This thesis is concerned with the question of whether mainstream political media has been captured by misleading, narrative driven content during the post-primary portion of the 2016 United States presidential election cycle. I conducted an analysis of content of political articles and compared the factual information contained within to how the publication framed the story. I surveyed of two types of political news story from the election: conspiracy theory and scandal. When narrative influence was found, I then traced the narrative to its origin to determine which actors had gatekeeping power over mainstream media.

Twitter, a microblogging platform, has been increasingly used as a tool for political election campaigns. In an attempt to persuade people to vote for them, candidates and political parties worldwide have begun to incorporate Twitter in their campaigns to disseminate campaign information, promote themselves, and mobilize voters. In the 2016 U.S presidential election, Donald Trump had actively utilized Twitter to promote his campaign and convince voters to support him, which helped him earn a strong presence and huge popularity on Twitter. Eventually Trump even successfully got elected as the 45th US president. Although the rise of Twitter in political campaigns has been studied by researches from different disciplines, there have been very few studies focusing on Donald Trump or his communication performance on social media in the 2016 US presidential campaign. Besides, it is found that there is a lack of studying candidates’ social media use from the perspective of persuasive communication. In order to reveal how Donald Trump was making use of Twitter to influence audiences’ attitudes, this paper will present a content analysis of Donald Trump’s Twitter use from the perspective of persuasive communication. Specifically, the study will investigate the characteristics of messages demonstrated from Donald Trump’s tweets, and examine whether his messages placed an emphasis on certain aspects. The aim of this study is to offer insights into Donald Trump’s Twitter use, particularly about his persuasive communication on Twitter during the political election campaign.

The main focus of this thesis is the American election of 2016 and how it was reported in four Swedish newspapers; Svenska Dagbladet, Dagens Nyheter, Expressen and Aftonbladet. The theoretical approach is based on an analysis of news values, explaining what generally attracts the attention of media outlets, specifically newspapers. A quantitative content analysis shows that Donald Trump was by far the most reported presidential candidate in the leading Swedish newspapers. Hillary Clinton was more seldom reported about. All newspapers had strong strong arguments against Donald Trumps presidential candidature, but the support for Hillary Clinton was at the same time relatively weak.

Recent studies have shown that skepticism about human-caused climate change has increased among people in Europe and the United States. Researchers have tried to examine the causes behind this trend. What some of the studies have found is that there could be connectivity between populistic and nationalistic ideologies and climate skepticism. The purpose of this study has been to, through an idea analysis, examine the American president Donald Trump to see what type of climate sceptic he is according to the typology created by Rahmstorf. Furthermore, the study seeks to understand if the scepticism could be linked to the theories of populism and nationalism. The study is based on interviews done by newspapers and tv-shows but also tweets written by Trump. The study found that Trump’s climate scepticism could be classified into all of Rhamstorf’s different levels of skepticism. It also found that Trump’s argumentation in the interviews and in his tweets could, in accordance with earlier research, be linked to populism and nationalism.

The US presidential election of 2016 between the republican Donald Trump and the democrat Hillary Clinton was special in the aspect of the fierce tone between the two candidates, largely by personal attacks and how the media to a large extent focused on this rather than political issues. Many evangelical leaders decided to endorse Trump, even though their earlier outspoken criticism toward Trumps previously controversial statements about women, immigrants and minorities. In six articles this case study examines how the authors from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal frame the relationship between Trump and evangelical leaders during the 2016 US election. This is done by using a framing analysis and the categories: actors, characteristics, motives and goals which help me to answer a couple of analysis questions and latter put it into context of Snow and Benfords (1988) three tasks of framing. In this way I can answer the first research question: ”How is the relationship between Donald Trump and the evangelical leaders represented in the selected cases and how can this be understood by using Snow and Benfords (1988) three tasks of framing; diagnostic, prognostic and motivational framing?” The second research question “How can the framing of the relationship between Trump and the evangelical leaders be understood according to Hjarvards (2012) theory medialization of religion with a focus on media as language?” visualizes the attitudes and the shaping of frames contained in the articles. The study concludes that the three tasks of framing help assign causation, identify reasons, strategies and solutions to the phenomenon that is framed by the authors of the articles, but also how Trump and evangelicals are framed by the authors to rationalize the defined measures. The results show that the authors of the articles mainly focus on Trumps motives and goals to gain support of evangelical leaders vice versa the leaders which want to gain ground and influence the politics Trump is going to convey. This can be seen in both NYT and the WSJ articles through the framing of Trump and his fierce tone toward Clinton and her campaign. It is also recurrent that the authors of the article describe how Trump uses a language aimed at the Christian right and its leaders to promise them to pursue a value-conservative policy that favor them.

• Problemformulering och syfte: Syftet med undersökningen är att ta reda på hur mycket och hur svensk media bevakar nyheterna kring Donald Trump som uppstår genom hans twittrande och hur den ser ut nu jämfört i början av hans presidentskap i dags- och kvällstidningar. • Metod och material Undersökningen är en kvalitativ och kvantitativ innehållsanalys om hur Expressen och Dagens Nyheter har rapporterat om Donald Trumps twittrande sedan han blev president. • Huvudresultat Studiens resultat visar att Dagens Nyheter skriver mer om Donald Trump, men att Expressen har en högre andel artiklar om Donald Trumps twittrande. Det går inte att se någon tydlig förändring över tid utan kurvan går upp och ner under hela perioden. Båda tidningarna gestaltar Donald Trumps twittrande genom saklig skandalgestaltning. Studien visar även att redaktionerna lägger upp artiklarna på olika sätt. Expressen skriver om fler saker i samma artikel medan Dagens Nyheter delar upp det i olika artiklar.

We outline four connections between xenophobia and punitiveness toward criminals in a national sample of Americans. First, among self-identified whites xenophobia is more predictive of punitiveness than specific forms of racial animus. Second, xenophobia and punitiveness are strongly connected among whites, but are only moderately and weakly related among black and Hispanic Americans, respectively. Third, among whites substantial proportions of the variance between sociodemographic, political, and religious predictors of punitiveness are mediated by levels of xenophobia. Finally, xenophobia is the strongest overall predictor of punitiveness among whites. Overall, xenophobia is an essential aspect of understanding public punitiveness, particularly among whites.