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The third PIPE Workshop of the Spring 2024 semester will be Tuesday, February 6, noon, in RGL, 308.

Our speaker will Benjamin Noble (UCSD).

The title of Ben’s talk and abstract appear below:

Fighting Words: How Presidents Go Public in War and Peace

How does war, and its effects on presidential power, shape presidential rhetoric and leadership? Theories of going public emphasize the limits of presidential persuasion, but focus on peacetime politics when presidents are weaker. In war, anticipating accommodation from elites and the public, I argue presidents eschew persuasion. They leverage the moral, emotional, and mobilizing rhetoric of war to push not only foreign, but also domestic, policy priorities across a range of issue areas. I collect all presidential statements delivered since 1933, code their topics, and use word embedding methods to measure the degree of moral-emotional (relative to analytical) language in 478,000 spoken paragraphs. I support my hypothesis treating the post-September 11th wars as a semi-natural experiment and with correlational evidence from major wars since World War II. This research expands our understanding of the two-presidencies thesis and going public. It raises normative concerns about how wartime presidents exacerbate informational asymmetries.

A copy of Ben’s paper can be found here.

After Ben’s talk, we will have a formal discussant: William Resh (USC POIR)

Lunch will be provided and set out about 20-30 minutes before the talk begins.