Using language to get votes

University Week offers a series of faculty interviews on election-related issues. Today we interview David Domke, assistant professor of communications and a faculty associate of the new Center for Communication and Civic Engagement. His article “Rights and Morals, Issues, and Candidate Integrity: Insights into the Role of News Media,” will appear in the December issue of Political Psychology.

UNIVERSITY WEEK: Your research looks at how politicians deliver their messages. How are the presidential candidates using language to get our votes?

David Domke

DOMKE: One of the things candidates do is what we might call issue-framing - that is, consistent use of certain words, symbols, and images to convey their positions. For example, whenever Gore refers to Social Security and Medicare he always says he’s going to put it in a “lockbox.” He says it almost too much, in fact.

UNIVERSITY WEEK: But is it effective?

DOMKE: It’s very effective. Because of our late-night TV talk-show culture, candidates’ word choices sometimes begin to be mocked. But they’re only mocked if they are clearly linked with a candidate’s identity, which is exactly what a candidate is hoping for. Another example I find very interesting is Bush’s charge that we’re in an “education recession.”

UNIVERSITY WEEK: Can you decode that for us?

DOMKE: He certainly can’t say we’re in an economic recession, but he is able to draw upon the connotations of what a recession means and link them to education. It seems to introduce a moral component: that in the midst of a great economic expansion, we have an education recession. Consider it in the light of other things Bush says. He has repeatedly accused Clinton-Gore of having squandered opportunities. Implicit is the notion of failure, and to fail one’s children is always seen as a moral failure.

UNIVERSITY WEEK: And hasn’t morality long been a Republican theme, under the rubric of “family values?”

DOMKE: Morality was originally the issue on which Bush thought he would be able to win this election. What happened is that Gore effectively dealt with that by framing himself as someone who’d been married for 30 years, was a great father, and so forth. And so for a good couple of months, in polls on whether you trust these candidates, Gore had caught up to Bush. But then this whole “Gore as serial exaggerator” episode began. That’s when Gore began to be hurt again.

UNIVERSITY WEEK: Because it undermined the trust?

DOMKE: And it triggered what people didn’t like about Clinton: his choosing of words so carefully, his slickness. Gore had effectively said, “I’m not another Clinton.” But now people are wondering. And that’s the power of discourse frames: they suggest what linkages are appropriate and what ones are not.

UNIVERSITY WEEK: What you’re saying is that with political language, the meaning is beneath the surface?

DOMKE: Bush and his supporters have characterized Gore as a “serial exaggerator,” which obviously is code for a liar. But if they were to go so far as using the word “liar,” that’s too negative and personal for people. With education, if Bush were to call it an education “failure,” people would get upset, because you would be hitting too close to home for their kids. So, it’s an education recession.

UNIVERSITY WEEK: How do candidates figure out which of these linguistic cues, as you call them, to deploy?

DOMKE: They test them before going public, so to speak. During the impeachment proceedings, the White House did many polls to find out what terminology would work for Clinton with the public. They found very quickly that any kind of discussion of “lies” or “truth” was going to hurt him badly. Conversely, they found that any discussion of “private” versus “public” was going to work for him. So they framed their response in terms of, “This was a private act.” What you have in contemporary politics is very carefully constructed language choices that reflect a great deal of public-opinion research.

UNIVERSITY WEEK: Isn’t all this rather manipulative?

DOMKE: Of course. But that doesn’t suggest it’s any different than the art of persuasion has always been. Candidates are merely trying to find language that conveys their message in a way that the lingua franca of politics - the 30-second commercial - can handle. Language choices such as “lockbox” and “education recession” are perfectly matched to that.

UNIVERSITY WEEK: Are we just doomed, then, to base our vote on words created for 30-second ads?

DOMKE: It would help if network television began to live up to its responsibilities in return for the public airwaves. During the month before the election, they should provide 30 minutes of free air time in prime time, a couple of times a week. The candidates would have to explain issues in the kind of depth that you don’t get in the ads. So far, Fox Network, but none of the Big Three, has volunteered to do this. And yet remember the Ross Perot infomercials in ’92, with the charts, and people kind of chuckled? You know what? The public liked that! Perot, of course, had the money to do it. What I’m saying is, let’s make it so you don’t have to have that kind of money.