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ABSTRACT
I examine how a politician’s speaking style influences how voters evaluate the candidate. I argue that, above and beyond the content of the message, how a candidate conveys the message has important effects for voter evaluations of the candidate. I focus on two speaking styles: a powerful, straightforward and direct speaking style, and a powerless style, marked by hesitations, hedging and questions. Using original experimental data, I find that candidates who adopt a powerful speaking style in a debate are evaluated more favorably than those with a powerless speaking style. I also find that this effect is somewhat dependent upon the speaker’s gender – women are penalized more than men for adopting a powerless speaking style. Among female participants, the gender gap in evaluations is eliminated for women who adopt a powerful, but not a powerless, speaking style. Among male participants, however, the gender gap exists regardless of speaking style. I additionally find that powerless speaking style makes candidates more likely to be interrupted in the 2016 Presidential primary debates.
Acknowledgement
I thank Madison Grady for outstanding research assistance. I thank Cindy Kam, Lasse Laustsen, Allison Archer, Fred Batista-Pereira, Maggie Deichert, Drew Engelhardt, Beth Estes, Marc Trussler and Bryce Williams-Tuggle for helpful advice. I thank Allison Archer and Mark Richardson for providing voice recordings for the experiments in this manuscript. A previous version of this paper was presented at the 74th Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
3 Text retrieved from the Commission on Presidential Debates, https://www.debates.org/voter-education/debate-transcripts/september-23-1976-debate-transcript/.
4 Roughly 52% of the sample was female, 51% Democrat, 41% Republican, and 75% white with a mean age of about 20. For group assignment, 66 individuals were assigned to the powerless man condition, 82 to the powerless woman condition, 79 to the powerful man condition, and 74 to the powerful woman condition. This is a convenience sample, and care should be taken when generalizing these findings to an older, less educated population. However, given the substantive magnitude of many of these effects, I feel that external validity concerns in this study are minimal.
5 The actual text was adapted from a 2014 debate between Jerry Brown and Neel Kashkari for the California Gubernatorial election.
6 As such, this study does not allow me to determine the effects of speaking style with partisan cues. Given the power of partisan cues on candidate preference, I do not expect speaking style would overwhelm partisanship.
7 In the discussion of results, I use guidance from Bittner and Goodyear-Grant (Citation2017) to discuss the role of gender and sex. For politicians, gender was evoked by only a masculine or feminine voice in the statements. For participants, they were asked to identify whether they are male or female. As such, I will refer to candidate gender, but participant sex in discussion of these results.
8 Full question texts are available in Appendix B.
9 All results are also robust to OLS models with controls for speaker gender, age, subject sex, subject race, ideology, and partisanship. These models are presented in Appendix C.
10 This variable ranges from 0 (lowest quality) to 24 (highest quality) with an overall mean of 12.41 and standard deviation of 4.96.
11 Participants were asked a question about their gender, but only given options to identify as male and female, matching more closely to the concept of sex.
12 Unfortunately, debate data does not allow a thorough analysis based on gender, as there were only 2 women candidates (Hillary Clinton, a Democrat, and Carly Fiorina, a Republican) among the 2016 presidential candidates.
14 Here, markers of powerless style included hedges, intensifiers, hesitations, and tagging. A complete set of coding rules are available in Appendix D. The research assistant was provided these details on how to code the speeches and was blind to all hypotheses in the study during the coding. Coding instructions required the research assistant to only code for data that met criteria in the coding rules set forth in Appendix D.
15 All analyses are restricted to using number of interruptions by another debater as the dependent variable. Results are substantively and statistically similar when including number of interruptions by anyone (debater or moderator), but there are no statistical or substantive effects of powerless language on being interrupted by just the moderator.
16 Interruption behavior may indeed be gendered, with women more likely to be interrupted than men. However, in this dataset, there is little evidence to suggest this occurred for the two female candidates in the sample. Hillary Clinton was interrupted with similar frequency to Bernie Sanders, and Carly Fiorina was interrupted below the mean rate for Republican debaters.
17 Results are somewhat robust to excluding Donald Trump from these analyses. With an N of only 134, powerless speech predicts a 0.024 increase in interruptions in Model 1 (p=.11), and a 0.019 increase in model 2 (p=.08). Looking at each marker individually, only hedging and hesitations retain their statistical significance. This is perhaps unsurprising, since Trump used intensifiers more commonly than other debaters, but was not any more likely to use hesitation, hedging, or tagging.
18 Interruptions range from 0 to 36, with a mean of 3.17 and a standard deviation of 5.69.