Master of Science / Department of Journalism & Mass Communications / Sam Mwangi / This study examines what function presidential candidate e-mail messages serve. Are messages being sent out most frequently as an acclaim, a defense, or an attack? Are these messages attempting to reach the undecided voter or mobilize the already-committed? Furthermore, are these messages getting into policy discussion? Taking into consideration the commonalities between presidential rhetoric and propaganda theory, a content analysis was conducted on 280 official campaign emails from the 2012 Romney and Obama Campaigns covering the span of September 16, 2012 to November 6, 2012. Specifically, this study investigates the prevalence of “acclaim” messages versus “attack” messages, compares messages dealing with character to those dealing with policy, codes messages as being either informational content, involvement and engagement, or mobilization, and analyzes the differences of messages sent by presidential candidates in 2012. In all, 82.6% of candidate e-mails were coded as an “acclaim” message, and the majority of candidate messages (59.1%) fell under “involvement and engagement”, meaning they requested an initial commitment be made by the recipient. Fifteen percent of messages were coded as being related to character, while policy messages made up 20% of all messages. Romney held an edge in overall number of “attack” messages sent out at 25%, compared to just 6.4% sent out by Obama. Results seem to suggest that persuasion of the undecided voter was not the purpose of presidential e-mail messages in the 2012 election.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:KSU/oai:krex.k-state.edu:2097/15633 |
| Date | January 1900 |
| Creators | Mosier, Joshua |
| Publisher | Kansas State University |
| Source Sets | K-State Research Exchange |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Report |
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