This paper reports on visual analyses of U.S. presidential debates, comparing the recent 2012 debates between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney with the infamous 1960 debates between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. For each set of debates, a shot-by-shot analysis is performed on the candidates’ nonverbal communication style, delivery, visual presentation, and associated camera techniques. Categories for analysis are derived from the “image bites” coding framework introduced by Grabe and Bucy (2009) in their analysis of the visual framing of presidential elections.
For the 2012 debates, particular emphasis is placed on the communicative behavior of President Obama, who appeared sluggish and tired in his first debate encounter with Romney—a performance that gave the Romney campaign momentum in the polls. In addition to measuring screen time, camera angles, visual composition elements, and shot lengths, the analysis will document the variability of each candidate’s facial display repertoires, including the frequency and duration of happiness/reassurance, anger/threat, and fear/evasion displays. Overall, the analysis will determine the extent to which each candidate exhibited an agonic (competitive) or hedonic (affiliative) communication style.
The results for 2012 will then be compared with the coding results for the 1960 debates, in which common wisdom has long assumed has that Richard Nixon lost the first televised debate against John F. Kennedy due to a poor visual presentation and awkward nonverbal communication style. Although much discussed and analyzed, the visual aspects of the 1960 debates, including not just the widely remembered first debate but the three subsequent debates, have never been subjected to systematic investigation.
In addition to visual variables, the presentation summarizes focus group responses to key encounters between the candidates in 1960 and 2012, addressing broader questions about whether “losing” on communication style affects viewer interpretations of policy substance.
