It s not what you say, but how you say it. Solving problems with words is the essence of politics, and finding the right words for the moment can make or break a politician s career. Yet very little has been said in political science about the elusive element of tone.
In "Political Tone," Roderick P. Hart, Jay P. Childers, and Colene J. Lind analyze a range of texts from speeches and debates to advertising and print and broadcast campaign coverage using a sophisticated computer program, DICTION, that parses their content for semantic features like realism, commonality, and certainty, as...