Etch-a-Sketching: Evaluating the Post-Primary Rhetorical Moderation Hypothesis
| Author | Amber E. Boydstun,Yanchuan Sim,Justin H. Gross,Brice D.L. Acree,Noah A. Smith |
| Published date | 01 January 2020 |
| Date | 01 January 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X18800017 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2018
Article
American Politics Research
2020, Vol. 48(1) 99 –131
Etch-a-Sketching:
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Primary Rhetorical
Moderation Hypothesis
Brice D.L. Acree1, Justin H. Gross2, Noah A. Smith3,
Yanchuan Sim4, and Amber E. Boydstun5
Abstract
Candidates have incentives to present themselves as strong partisans in
primary elections, and then move “toward the center” upon advancing to
the general election. Yet, candidates also face incentives not to flip-flop on
their policy positions. These competing incentives suggest that candidates
might use rhetoric to seem more partisan in the primary and more moderate
in the general, even if their policy positions remain fixed. We test this idea by
measuring ideological moderation in presidential campaign language. Using a
supervised two-stage text analysis model, we find evidence that presidential
candidates in 2008 and 2012 use more ideologically extreme language during
primary campaigns, and then moderate their tone when shifting to the general
election, with troubling implications for representation and accountability.
Keywords
political communication, ideology, presidential campaigning, text analysis
1The Ohio State University, Columbus, USA
2University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA
3University of Washington, Seattle, USA
4Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore
5University of California, Davis, USA
Corresponding Author:
Justin H. Gross, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 200 Hicks Way, Thompson Hall 320,
Amherst, MA 01003, USA.
Email: jhgross@umass.edu
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American Politics Research 48(1)
Fugelsang: It’s fair to say that John McCain was a considerably more moderate
candidate than the ones Governor Romney faces now. Is there concern that the
pressure from Santorum and Gingrich might force the governor to move so far
to the right it would hurt him with moderate voters in the general election?
Fehrnstrom: Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything
changes. It’s almost like an Etch-A-Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and
restart all over again.
—Eric Fehrnstrom, Spokesman for presidential candidate Mitt Romney, questioned
by John Fugelsang on CNN during the 2012 presidential primaries.
Introduction
Conventional wisdom suggests that candidates should present themselves as
strong partisans in primary elections, and then move “toward the center” upon
advancing to the general election. Eric Fehrnstrom, in his candid comment
above, offered after candidate Mitt Romney won the Illinois primary in 2012,
simply provided a metaphor for a phenomenon politicos have long assumed to
be true. Informal Google searches for “tack toward the center” or “flip-flop
primary general” return thousands of news stories and blog posts about candi-
dates, at all levels of government and spanning decades, undergoing similar
metamorphoses: appealing to party diehards in primary elections before
attempting to appear centrist when campaigning in the general election.
Yet this hypothesized phenomenon of post-primary moderation is
directly at odds with the incentives candidates face not to flip-flop by
changing their issue positions. Thus, on one hand, we should expect candi-
dates to tack toward the center following the primary election, while on the
other hand, we should expect candidates to maintain a set of stable posi-
tions. We argue that these expectations can be reconciled by considering
that candidates can use rhetoric to appeal first to their base during the pri-
mary, then to more centrist voters during the general, all while maintaining
essentially static policy views.
We refer colloquially to this expectation—that candidates shift from using
more partisan rhetoric in the primary election to more centrist rhetoric in the
general election—as the “Etch-a-Sketch”1 hypothesis. If true, it has impor-
tant implications, as electoral representation and accountability are crucial
for democracy (Powell, 2000). If candidates do indeed choose language to
appeal to different types of voters at each stage of the election, it suggests that
during either the primary or the general election—or both—candidates are
presenting a less-than-accurate version of themselves to voters; a wolf in
Acree et al.
101
sheep’s clothing, as it were. Thus, to the extent that voters’ perceptions can be
shaped by a politician’s rhetoric—and research shows that they can be
(Druckman & Holmes, 2004; Nelson, 2004)—the rhetoric candidates use to
portray themselves as more or less partisan or more or less radical than they
really are hinders voters’ abilities to make informed choices about which can-
didate would best represent them and, moreover, which inferred promises
candidates will be accountable for once elected.
To date, researchers have addressed the question of whether candidates
“tack toward the center” by examining whether candidates change their pol-
icy stances, and find only modest degrees of moderation (Burden, 2001,
2004). These findings make sense in light of the notion that it should be elec-
torally costly for candidates to “flip-flop” on policy positions, which are easy
to compare over the course of a campaign. Yet such findings would appear to
contradict the game theoretic expectation—supported by anecdotes such as
Fehrnstrom’s statement—that strategic candidates are those who find a way
to start out more partisan or ideologically extreme during the primary, then
become in some sense more moderate during the general election. Our study
unifies the formal theoretic and empirical expectations of candidate behavior.
We contend that scholars have overlooked perhaps the most fruitful and least
risky manner in which candidates may signal moderation: changing rhetoric.
Language is a powerful political tool. Through rhetoric, candidates can play
to the particular audience at hand—the ideological base during the primary,
the median voter during the general—without shifting positions.
Our theory of rhetorical moderation seeks to establish three points: (a)
Candidates have an incentive to appear more moderate in general elections
than in primary elections; (b) rhetoric affords a means to create and sustain a
more moderate appearance without the risk of looking like a “flip-flopper”;
and (c) candidates systematically change their rhetoric in transitioning from
the primary to the general election. In the sections to follow, we explore these
points and mobilize a large corpus of political rhetoric to illustrate our theory
at work in recent presidential campaigns. To preview the findings, we show
that presidential candidates do in fact use more ideologically extreme lan-
guage in primary elections before moving rhetorically toward the center in
the general elections.
Theory
Incentives for Moderation
Convergence theory starts from a basic premise, formalized by Hotelling
(1929), Black (1948), and Downs (1957), concerning the median voter model
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American Politics Research 48(1)
for majority decision making. We begin by imagining voters scattered along
a single dimensional space which may represent “ideal points,” broadly
defined as political ideology, policy preference, or some other criterion. If
voters possess single-peaked preferences, the utility each voter extracts from
a potential outcome declines monotonically in the distance between the voter
and the outcome. Downs argues that parties in a two-party system should thus
maximize support by staking out positions near that of the median voter. If
parties had no concern for maintaining unique identities, in fact, they would
become indistinguishable. In practice, parties have genuine ideological and
policy differences, and represent unique bases of party activists, and thus
never truly converge. But the American example does show two parties more
centrist in their orientations—at least historically—and more concerned with
“independent” voters than parties in multiparty systems (Burden, 2001).
Applying the median voter theory to two-stage elections instead of single-
cycle elections requires generalization beyond the simple theories of Black
and Downs. The most naïve model asserts that candidates face two stages of
median voter pressure: first, a candidate should seek the median primary
voter to secure a party’s nomination; if the candidate wins, he or she would
then need to converge toward the general electorate median voter. As prima-
ries tend to be dominated by party activists, who in turn tend to be more
ideologically extreme (Brady, Han, & Pope, 2007), a full election cycle
should see the candidate transitioning away from the general electorate
median during the primary and then back toward the political center after
winning the primary.
Cox (1990) defines these two conflicting sets of incentives as centrifugal
and centripetal forces. Centrifugal forces push candidates outward, away
from the political center. These include pressure from party activists and die-
hard partisans, who tend to be ideologically consistent and demand ideologi-
cal purity from candidates. Centripetal forces pull candidates toward the
political center. This includes pressure from general election voters, who tend
to be more moderate in their policy preferences and less ideologically...
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