Zachary Scott

Political Communication Scholar

Media Primaries

My primary ongoing research project, which stems from my dissertation research, addresses how the mass media cover presidential primary campaigns and the implications for candidates, parties, and voters.

One part of this project studies how the media allot coverage in primaries. This includes both aggregate patterns of coverage (as in an 2021 article at the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties) and individual candidate correlates of coverage (as in a working paper presented at the 2021 ICA and at the 2020 Political Communication Preconference at APSA).

Another examines why some presidential primary candidates are successful at getting their issue agendas across in the media while others aren’t so fortunate. In 2016, Donald Trump campaigned extensively on immigration, trade, and appeals to his own personal brand. The media echoed that agenda. Jeb Bush campaigned on economic policy, healthcare, and foreign policy but the media focused on other issues like education and immigration. Why was one candidate able to drive the media agenda while another wasn’t? By merging communication theories of journalism professionalism norms and gatekeeping, political science studies on the incentive structures created by the unique electoral rules of primaries, and computational means of processing text as data, I devise a testable theory that points to “newsworthiness values” such as conflict, human interest, and simplicity as the key factor. I’ve demonstrated how the rhetorical choices of candidates (in a 2021 article at Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly) and the format of the race itself (in a 2021 article in American Politics Research) meaningfully intersect with these newsworthiness values.

Using a laboratory experiment, I show that success and failure at agenda transmission matters for how voters process primary campaigns. Getting your agenda across leads people to view candidates as more electable while failure to convey an agenda leads people to doubt the candidate’s issue priorities. And lower convergence reduces voters’ ability to identify the candidate that is right for them, further illustrating the important role that parties have outsourced to the media in their nomination contests.

Incentives and Constraints on Symbolic Elite Rhetoric

In addition to my research on elite agendas, I also conduct research on the use of symbolic or otherwise less substantive appeals including emotions, traits, and presentation style.

My current research on the incentives and constraints on elite emotional appeals utilizes my corpus of presidential primary speeches. To date, I have examined how the format of campaign events influences candidates’ proclivity in using certain emotional cues (published in The Year in C-SPAN Research, 7th Ed.) and how candidate identities like partisanship, race, and gender do (but mostly do not) constrain emotional appeals (coauthored with Jared McDonald, published in a 2022 article in American Politics Research). Future research will focus on temporal variation in emotional appeals, including a paper in preparation to be presented at the 2022 annual meeting of APSA (coauthored with Jared McDonald).

My research on trait appeals situates presidential primary contest rhetoric among other contexts. In a project coauthored with Jared McDonald (forthcoming in The Year in C-SPAN Research, 8th Ed.), I examine how gendered differences in the use of “authority” and “caring” rhetoric varies across political contexts as a means of assessing if the root cause is socialization of candidates or audience expectation constraints.

A pair of research projects examine ideological and partisan insults. First, I’ve studied Republican elite usage of the phrase “Democrat Party” (an improperly conjugated version of their opponent’s name intended as an insult or slur). This working paper, coauthored with David Karol, shows that there has been a significant uptick in the frequency with which it is deployed in the past 2-3 years. Right-wing media appears to be the primary driver. Second, an ongoing project (coauthored with Andrew Lugg) examines the use of the “globalist” insult, specifically as it is deployed on Twitter. A paper in preparation from this project will be presented at the 2022 annual meeting of APSA.

party responsiveness

My latest research concerns recent changes to the American political parties, namely the perceived increase in populism and the potential rise of “Trumpian” ideology or style. One project (published in Political Research Quarterly) looks at populist rhetorical styles in presidential primaries, showing that the Democratic party, but not the Republican party, assimilates the agendas of candidates with populist styles, but not necessarily the style itself, when electoral success is demonstrated. Another project looks at the Republican party’s response to Donald Trump’s electoral defeat, showing that the party is more favorable than critical, but that the modal member of the Republican party appears to be abstaining from discussing Trump at all. A working paper stemming from this project was presented at the 2022 annual meeting of MPSA.