"Selective speaking: The new form of ""Going Public"""

Roberts, Brian

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/18591 Copy

Description

Title

"Selective speaking: The new form of ""Going Public"""

Author(s)

Roberts, Brian

Issue Date

2011-01-21T22:50:58Z

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Gaines, Brian J.

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Gaines, Brian J.

Committee Member(s)

• Althaus, Scott L.
• Tewksbury, David H.
• Quirk, Paul

Department of Study

Political Science

Discipline

Political Science

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• going public
• presidential communication
• presidential leadership
• permanent campaign
• presidential rhetoric

Abstract

The central assertion of the vast “going public” literature is that since the mid-1970s, the traditional strategy of executive-legislative bargaining has been largely supplanted by direct appeals from American presidents to the American public. In their attempt to analyze the causes and consequences of this use of presidential speeches, scholars have relied almost exclusively on analysis of major national addresses rather than the significantly more frequent minor addresses. Indeed, it is these minor presidential addresses that are most responsible for the exponential growth in presidential speechmaking activity during the modern presidency. Analyzing data of every presidential speech between 1945 and 2004, I present compelling empirical evidence that the “going public” strategy can be best understood by concentrating more attention on these minor addresses, specifically the audience of these minor addresses. Using what is arguably the most pointed and extensive treatment of the audience of minor addresses to date and an illustrative case study, I document a clear increase in the number of speeches by presidents to what I classify as more selective rather than public audiences. In addition to descriptive accounts of this paradigmatic shift in presidential speechmaking, negative binomial regression and multinomial logit models identify leading conditions that influence both the frequency and choice of speeches to various audience types, particularly selective audiences. The study concludes with a discussion of the normative implications of the empirical evidence.

Graduation Semester

2010-12

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/18591

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2010 Brian Roberts

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