(“Every time we have expanded trade, we have experienced economic
growth. Trade barriers may seem like a good idea, but historically,
they’ve led to disastrous outcomes. The barriers created by the Smoot-
Hawley tariff, for example, helped cause the Great Depression...”)
6) Appealing to the public’s sense of obligation or duty to support a
policy. We are more likely to appeal to obligation when appeals to interest
or inclination are unlikely to work. The president may say that we have
“no choice” but to support his policy given our common values – as if to
recognize that if we did have a choice, we might not want to do what he
asks. (“It is not right to saddle our children’s generation with the task of
cleaning up our mistakes...”)
None of these elements is strictly incompatible with following public opinion;
they will all occur occasionally in “following” speeches. But they should all be more
frequent in speeches that involve significant leadership of public opinion. Presidents
using these elements in their speeches will be recognizing that the people need to be sold
on the policy. The lack of these elements would suggest that the president is following
public opinion.
The unit of analysis is the paragraph, and coders are instructed to determine the
presence or absence of each of the six features, and if present, to assign a score based on
whether the statement is a clear example (two points) or a vague example (one point).
The scores for each paragraph are then summed to create an overall score for each
speech. This raw score represents the dependent variable in this analysis. Speeches of
much different lengths are compared to one another without any statistical normalization.
The reason for doing so is based on the assumption that employing leading rhetoric is
costly, and any mention of the leading-style arguments indicate concern for public
opinion, regardless of how many other statements the president makes. For example, the
president could bury three clear statements of public skepticism in a long speech of one
hundred paragraphs, but the very fact that he acknowledges these concerns (when he
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Convention