Gender, Candidate Emotional Expression, and Voter Reactions During Televised Debates

Televised Debates in Parliamentary Democracies

SPIN (AND PITCH) DOCTORS: Campaign Strategies in Televised Political Debates

Political campaigns frequently set low expectations (using a ‘‘low pitch’’) in televised political debates to make the later claim that their candidates have done better than expected. The limited credibility of campaign aides, coupled with the fact that perception often confirms expectations, makes this strategy psychologically problematic. In Study 1, when no post-debate information was provi...

Facial asymmetry during emotional expression: gender, valence, and measurement technique.

The purpose of the current study was to examine 49 extant experiments of facial asymmetry during emotional expression in normal adult males and females in regard to gender, valence, and measurement technique. When facial asymmetry was evaluated by trained judges or muscle quantification, facial expressions were left-sided, a finding implicating the right cerebral hemisphere in emotional express...

Voter Choice and Candidate Uncertainty

When citizens enter the voting booth on election day, they do so in an environment where the stakes are often unclear. Over the last 40 years, political scientists have been interested in the choice dynamics at work in such situations. Recent work in political science has taken up the question of issue voting under conditions of uncertainty—situations in which voters have imperfect information ...

Social media as a political backchannel: Twitter use during televised election debates in Norway

Twitter has within few years become a prominent “backchannel” for televised political debates by making audience reactions visible online. By adding a specific hashtag to their tweets, Twitter users can take part in larger, public conversations about an event, reaching outside their own network of followers and followees to join the “virtual loungeroom” (Harrington, 2012). The # character is us...