The President as Unifier-in-Chief: Priming Shared Traits, Not Political Violence

• In Event: Presidential Rhetoric and Public Opinion

Abstract

In recent decades, presidential approval ratings have been strongly connected with partisanship (Newman and Siegle 2010; Jacobson 2020). While presidents once enjoyed large, bipartisan audiences for their televised remarks, as entertainment options multiplied, presidents increasingly struggled to attract an audience than spanned party labels and instead, supporters of a president tuned in at far higher rates than their detractors (Kernell and Rice 2011). This undercuts presidents’ ability to successfully perform their historical role of unifier-in-chief. This is important because rhetoric from presidents can help define and redefine what it means to be an American (Roelofs 1992) and shape Americans’ views of political parties (Jacobson 2023). Could exposure to presidents’ unifying rhetoric that reminds Americans of their shared identify, without the potentially polarizing label of the president who said it, help lower affective polarization and reduce support for political violence? To explore these questions, we fielded national surveys in which we exposed participants to text excerpts from presidential speeches seeking to unify Americans across partisan and other divisions. Respondents were asked to guess which president said it and then were shown how many they were right about and how many they were wrong about along with who said each quote. To explore how these unifying speech excerpts may prime respondents to describe members of both parties, we later asked respondents to choose from a list of words, drawn mainly from the speech excerpts, that they think apply to members of both political parties. Preliminary results suggest the number of traits a respondent chooses is related to levels of affective polarization and support for political violence. We also find that some traits appear more consequential than others when it comes to respondents’ support for political violence, such as identifying members of both parties as American and as hardworking. This suggests that despite increased barriers to effectively serving as unifier-in-chief, presidential rhetoric that seeks to unify across party divisions, if listened to, can play an important role in bringing Americans together, which may consequently lessen support for political violence.

Authors

• Laurie L. Rice, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville

• Suranjan Weeraratne, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville

• Ken Moffett, Independent researcher