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4 - Persuasive Politics

The Strategic Use of Negative Evaluations in US Election Campaign Tweets

from II - Persuasion and (New) Contexts of Use

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2025

By
Christian R. Hoffmann
Edited by
Sofia Rüdiger  and
Daria Dayter
Sofia Rüdiger
Affiliation:
Universität Bayreuth, Germany
Daria Dayter
Affiliation:
Tampere University, Finland
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Summary

This chapter provides an in-depth analysis of the strategic use of negative evaluations in the Twitter campaigns by the Republican and Democratic candidate for the US presidency in 2020. The study combines a corpus-linguistic method (key semantic domain method) with Martin and White’s Appraisal framework to systematically capture and compare the dispersion, frequency and contextual use of negative evaluations by Joe Biden and Donald J. Trump. The study shows how corpus-linguistic methods can be usefully employed to systematize the quantitative and qualitative exploration of attitudinal evaluations in mid-size language corpora. Further, results indicate that Donald Trump’s targets and objects of negative evaluation in 2020 have broadened compared to his previous Twitter election campaign. This is likely to reflect Trump’s new official status as leader of the government, needing to defend his actions and decisions. In turn, Joe Biden’s negative evaluations on Twitter criticise such government policies with the principal aim to present Biden as a challenger of the status quo, fighting to create new jobs for the ‘ordinary man’. This constitutes a clear change in campaign policies of the Democratic party compared to their Twitter campaign for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Keywords

evaluationappraisalkey semantic domain methodDonald J. TrumpJoe Bidenpolitical discoursecorpus linguisticsTwittersocial mediapersuasion

Information

Type
Chapter
Information
Manipulation, Influence and Deception
The Changing Landscape of Persuasive Language
 , pp. 63 - 90
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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