Over three decades ago, one of the authors, a newly minted college student, sat in the audience of a live academic debate, utterly baffled. He’d tried following arguments. In fact, part of his grade in an argumentation course depended on it. But as anyone who’s attended a college forensics tournament knows, policy debaters are known for rattling off reasons at breakneck tempos. To the...

We are extremely grateful to the folks at Lexington Books for their assistance with this project. In particular, we appreciate Bob Denton for sharing our vision for the book. We also thank our editor, Nicolette Amstutz, for her always efficient, competent, helpful, and gracious responses to our frequent and pesky questions. We also appreciate Sierra Apaliski and Jessica Tepper for helping us with...

In a political world where appealing images often overshadow the substance of messages, it is ironic, perhaps, that the face of one of our least attractive, yet most sagacious, politicians is so ubiquitous, gazing back from the likes of statues and stamps, memorials and monuments, portraits and pennies. Indeed, by most accounts, the 16th president of the United States had an unpleasant...

The visual aspect of televised political debates has provided candidates an opportunity to reach voters and manage their impressions beyond their policy arguments. Ever since the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debate, scholars, media analysists, and political pundits have talked about the importance of the visual image a candidate presents on stage. In this chapter, we take a closer look at the fundamental...

As the contest for United States president heated up in early days of September 2012, the incumbent, Barack Obama, had reason for optimism. His party’s nominating convention not only provided a significant “bounce” in his polling numbers, by most indications, his projected lead in Electoral College votes was substantial (Obama ahead, 2012). By September’s end, however, the...

Although civility suggests that candidates in political debates should remain silent while their opponents are speaking, it is not always easy fading into the background, especially when you are under attack. Take the legendary Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, for instance. In the fourth debate, Abraham Lincoln announced that until Stephen Douglas “gives a better or more...

During the first presidential debate of 1960, while Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon sparred before a television audience of 70 million Americans, a contest of a different kind was taking place in the WBBM-TV control room (Schroeder, 2000). There, Don Hewitt, the debate’s director, had his hands full. According to Alan Schroeder (2000, p. 6), with the debate in...

“The heart of politics,” wrote W. Lawrence Neuman, “is persuasion” (1998, p. 319), an observation reflected in the first handbooks of social influence, or rhetoric. Penned in ancient Greece by teachers known as sophists, these handbooks instructed students in the art of persuading fellow citizens in the context of political gatherings. During that same era, Aristotle...

The practice of rhetoric (essentially, persuasion) is almost certainly as old as the earliest human settlements, and so vitally important to participating in the civic lives of ancient Athenians and Romans that citizens often pursued formal training. The first people we know of to write a systematic treatment of rhetoric were the Sicilians Corax (the teacher) and Tisias (a student of Corax)...

When Hillary Rodham Clinton and Donald J. Trump took the stage for the first of three televised presidential debates in late September of 2016, the country had already witnessed several notable “firsts” in U.S. history. First, the Republican primary elections included a record 17 major candidates, more than in any previous primary election (Linshi, 2015). In another first, Hillary...

Note: The first candidate listed won the election that year.

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John S. Seiter (PhD, University of Southern California) is a Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies in the Department of Languages, Philosophy, and Communication Studies at Utah State University. His research focuses broadly on persuasion and specifically on topics such as political aggression, effective approaches to compliance gaining, deception...

This series encourages focused work examining the role and function of communication in the realm of politics including campaigns and elections, media, and political institutions.