The Elusive Style of Sarah Palin and What it Means
Year: 2011
Type: preprint
Abstract: No less an authority than Elvis Presley once declared ambition to be “a dream with a V8 engine.” The former Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, epitomizes that dream, that engine. This study tracks the consequences of her ambition by analyzing how it becomes instantiated in her public discourse. Using computerized language analysis (specifically, the DICTION program), the authors compare Palin’s speech patterns to a wide assortment of other political leaders, keying specifically on the variable of Insistence, a marker of topic-maintenance and agenda control. We find Palin to be quite low on this variable, far lower that virtually all her counterparts and forebears. A sampling of other Tea Party supporters shows them to behave similarly. These data suggest that low Insistence scores result primarily from the intellectual incoherence associated with any young political movement. In Palin’s case, however, other factors are involved as well: (1) her sudden arrival on the political scene, (2) her inability (or unwillingness) to posit a single career trajectory, (3) her rather random philosophical worldview, (4) her combination of derring-do and an infectious personality, and (5) her willingness to live in the moment, to be psychologically emergent. The result is one of the most unique political and rhetorical profiles on the current scene.
Source: SSRN Electronic Journal
Institution: The University of Texas at Austin
Language: English
Subfield: Communication
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1520075333