Kevin M. Coe

My research focuses on the interaction of political discourse, news media, and public opinion in the United States. This work is anchored within the political communication and mass communication traditions of the Communication discipline, but draws widely from related literatures in Political Science, Psychology, and History. My three-part research program examines (a) how political elites communicate strategically to influence media coverage and public perceptions; (b) how news media report political news and transmit political messages; and (c) how public opinion is or is not shaped by political discourse. Thus far, my examination of these issues has largely focused on two topics: war and religion.

The first part of my research program seeks to identify and explain meaningful shifts in political discourse. Many of the debates about contemporary American politics (within the academy and beyond) focus on questions of change: How has 9/11 changed the nation? Are the two major parties becoming more polarized? Is religion a bigger part of politics today than it once was? I engage such questions by systematically tracking changes in political language. For example, I have demonstrated in multiple studies that President Bush’s rhetoric changed dramatically after 9/11, when he began using more morally charged and explicitly gendered language. I have also shown how Democrats and Republicans have differed historically in the ways they talk about the concept of freedom. Further, my continuing work on religion and politics documents how American political discourse transformed in the early 1980s in response to the political mobilization of conservative Christians. This research has produced two articles and a book, coauthored with David Domke, entitled The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America (Oxford University Press, 2008). The book tracks the strategic use of religion in American politics, particularly the presidency, over the past eight decades. It demonstrates that since 1980 religion has had an unprecedented role in U.S. politics.

The second part of my research program focuses on how news media report political news and supply the public with political information. Often this interest necessitates a focus on both the communications of political leaders and the news media’s coverage of those communications. Indeed, one of the primary scholarly debates that my work engages has to do with how much independence news organizations have from the political powers that be. Much of the work in this area focuses on which sources news stories rely upon, and the extent to which these sources dominate the stories. My work in this area takes a broader approach, examining the extent to which politicians are able to influence the way issues are talked about in news stories, regardless of what sources are present. For example, in a series of studies examining political discourse following 9/11, my colleagues and I found that newspapers and television news regularly followed the president’s lead in the specific terms they used to talk about political issues.

Finally, my research explores if and how political discourse and news coverage influence public opinion. This is perhaps the most important question of all and also the most difficult to answer. My approach has been twofold. In some cases, I have run experiments to isolate causal relationships and show how people respond to particular types of discourse. In one such project, my colleagues and I sought to understand how the increasing political polarization of television news might influence viewers. We found that partisan attachments dictate the news programs people choose, and encourage audiences to see news content as biased against their own position. In other work I use survey data to understand how discourse might influence public sentiment. Much of my current research on wartime communications, in particular, makes use of this approach. By using both of these techniques, depending on the specific research questions and available data, my research provides insight into the impact of political and media discourse on public opinion.

These three research emphases are brought together in my current work, which attempts to understand how modern presidents have justified war, the extent to which news media have adopted these justifications or offered their own, and how these justifications have or have not influenced public support for war. Much of the extant literature on presidential justifications for war has been too quick to assume that these justifications are uniform, and that they have an appreciable influence on public support for the war. My present research works with the population of presidents’ public wartime communications (made possible by computer content-analysis), which allows me to uncover surprising differences among presidents as well as meaningful over-time changes within a given war. Further, I am examining a year-long period during the Iraq War for which there are uncommonly detailed measures of public support. By tracking media content during this period as well, I am able to determine the extent to which presidential and press justifications for war are influencing public sentiment.