Erik Bucy

Texas Tech University | TTU · College of Media and Communication

Building upon the media participation hypothesis, this study examines the relationship between creative and consumptive media use during two pivotal midterm elections in the U.S.A series of regression analyses utilizing original, nationally representative data from 2014 and 2018 were modeled across dimensions of campaign participation, crossover po...

Star power can sometimes disrupt traditional democratic leadership by prioritizing fame and dramaturgy over election and accountability. Nevertheless, when electoral and star power align, they can synergistically bolster each other, granting significant political leverage to celebrity aspirants, often surpassing the achievements of conventional pol...

RESEARCH OBJECTIVE: This study uses mediatization theory and Goffman’s concept of self-presentation to explain the inseparable role of social media in the rise of Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukrainian politics and, since the Russian invasion, world consciousness. From the start, his political persona has been governed far more by media logic than politic...

The political landscape has tangibly changed in the past decade. Anger seems to be rising, and issues are no longer about what is best for the country but what fits the current post-compromise expectations of politics. This study analyzes the linguistic markers of this evolution through the lens of words that convey social hierarchy. This hierarchy...

The human smile can convey both rewarding and affiliative social intent and thus has significant utility in politics, where the ability to bond with and reassure voters is vital to electoral success. We examine experimental evidence from the 2019 UK general election to investigate the influence of a politician’s reward or affiliative smile on voter...

This study analyzed JMCQ articles in the specific topic area of mass communication technology and media channels, overall and across four 20-year periods. Primary topics changed from emphasizing media industry and policy issues, international issues of information freedom, audience research, and WWII media issues in early periods to more specific r...

The Rohingya people of Myanmar (formerly Burma) have been described by the UN as the ‘most persecuted ethnic group in the world’. Yet despite recognition of the Rohingya’s attempted eradication as a genocide, this humanitarian crisis is rarely the subject of intensive news coverage and largely flies under the radar of international media. When the...

As legitimate and voluminous as vexations about disinformation are, intended and unintended injury to information integrity—and to individuals consuming compromised content—are not new phenomena on the socio-political landscape. The circulation of exaggeration and lies is an historical reality of human self-organization. Yet the volume, velocity, a...

With the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision and repeal of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2022, access to abortion care and services continues to be drastically limited with restricted availability across the United States. This research seeks to examine and understand the debate from college-aged females who are th...

Computer vision techniques have recently burst onto the scene in visual political communication research, dramatically extending the scope of digital image and video analysis. Over the last five years, in particular, papers featuring computational methods have grown in frequency and breadth, appearing in a variety of journals across different disci...

On December 12, 2019, the United Kingdom's ruling Conservative Party called an election that put the country's 2016 “Brexit” referendum on leaving the European Union to the test. The divisive campaign and a polarized electorate culminated in large losses by opposition Labour and Liberal Democratic parties. Amid a polarized electorate, lingering que...

Drawing on propositions from the HAII-TIME (Human–artificial intelligence [AI] Interaction and the Theory of Interactive Media Effects) and Persuasion Knowledge Model, this study examines how knowledge of automated journalism (AJ) moderates the evaluation of algorithmically generated news. Experiment 1 demonstrates the utility of process-related kn...

Contemporary concerns about the integrity of information are not easily dismissible as merely a perennial cycle of moral panic. In an attempt to provide context and map territory for future research, this conceptual paper draws comparisons between disinformation, the deliberate fabrication and dissemination of false information, and tabloid news –...

As conflicts flare around the world, images of refugees have become a familiar presence in Western media. Drawing on existing accounts of visual influence, this analysis explores how (un)sympathetic refugee portrayals in news accounts affect distant viewers’ compassion responses and refugee policy attitudes. The study reports the results of three s...

Political communication is a dynamic, interdisciplinary field that has grown in stature and reach in recent decades, becoming more international in scope and orientation while gaining respect in political science as a legitimate area of inquiry. In the evolving and participatory media-politics landscape, it becomes important to ask how the cross-di...

This paper makes the case for the importance of analyzing audiovisual messages in political communication research and presents conceptual methodology for reliable assessment of visual content in audiovisual coverage of elections. These concepts can also be applied in experimental work to test the impact of different visual frames on media user per...

Live-tweeting has emerged as a popular hybrid media activity during broadcasted media events. Through second screens, users are able to engage with one another and react in real time to the broadcasted content. These reactions are dynamic: they ebb and flow throughout the media event as users respond to and converse about different memorable moment...

The current study examines how strategic versus true self-presentation strategies affect Facebook (FB) users’ subjective well-being (SWB) depending on their tie strength with existing FB friends. Results of a two-experiment study of FB users aged 18 to 67 demonstrate that users report greater happiness (Experiment 1) and higher degrees of subjectiv...

As conflicts flare around the world, images of refugees are a familiar presence in Western media. Drawing on existing accounts of refugee imagery, and on previous research on compassion and on Moral Foundations Theory, we demonstrate how refugee depictions that vary in terms of their sympathy framing influence public opinion, using three survey exp...

Health experts worry that a COVID-19 vaccine boycott could inhibit reaching “herd immunity,” and their concerns have only grown as the pandemic has spread. Concern has largely focused on anti-vaccine protestors, who captured headlines as they stood side by side with Tea Party activists and armed militia groups demonstrating against the quarantine i...

Compared to standard video presentations, 360-degree depictions have been found to heighten emotional and perceptual responses in viewers while minimizing concerns about media framing (Archer & Finger, 2018; Bucy, 2019). Results in this paper indicates that 1) 360-degree presentations viewed with a headset generated more discussion and a broader ra...

This study is a comparative content analysis of newspaper coverage of 8 press scandals--4 in the US and 4 in the UK. It is part of an ongoing project on accountability framing in newspaper coverage of press scandals.

Populism, as many have observed, is a communication phenomenon as much as a coherent ideology whose mass appeal stems from the fiery articulation of core positions, notably hostility toward “others,” bias against elites in favor of “the people,” and the transgressive delivery of those messages. Yet much of what we know about populist communication...

Presidential elections are emotion-laden affairs felt psychologically by both competitors and followers. The emotional fallout of losing competitive contests has been documented in the literature but little research has considered the change in affect among political followers in the aftermath of an unsuccessful election. This study examines change...

Televised political debates have received much attention by scholars in political communication and social psychology who study nonverbal cues in interpersonal communication and their impact on candidate evaluations. An abundance of political multimedia and new platforms have required leaders to develop an effective and unique communication “style”...

The vulnerabilities shown by media systems and individual users exposed to attacks on truth from fake news and computational propaganda in recent years should be considered in light of the characteristics and concerns surrounding big data, especially the volume and velocity of messages delivered over social media platforms that tax the average user...

This paper learns multi-modal embeddings from text, audio, and video views/modes of data in order to improve upon down-stream sentiment classification. The experimental framework also allows investigation of the relative contributions of the individual views in the final multi-modal embedding. Individual features derived from the three views are co...

Despite the pervasiveness of digital disinformation in society, little is known about the individual characteristics that make some users more susceptible to erroneous information uptake than others, effectively dividing the media audience into prone and resistant groups. This study identifies and tests procedural news knowledge as a consequential...

President Ronald Reagan’s expert use of media and his charismatic connection with viewers earned him the moniker “the great communicator”. This study examines one aspect of his charisma, the influence of elicited laughter, during a much-discussed and highly critical 5-minute news story by CBS reporter Leslie Stahl during the 1984 US presidential el...

Little research has considered the emotional response of the voting public to a politician’s smile and whether the outcome of an election mitigates this experience. This study examines changes in self-reported happiness, anger, and distress to different types of smiles by either President Barack Obama or his opponent Mitt Romney immediately prior t...

This chapter takes an integrative, multi-methodological approach to the analysis of political attacks during presidential debates. Using continuous response measures (CRM) recorded from viewers in real time during the third and final US presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, we identify an equal number of Trump’s char...

Raucous audience applause–cheering, laughter, and even booing by a passionately involved electorate marked the 2016 presidential debates from the start of the primary season. While the presence and intensity of these observable audience responses (OARs) can be expected from partisan primary debates, the amount of not just laughter, but also applaus...

This study examines the extent to which self-esteem moderates the influence of self-presentation style (true self versus strategic self) on Facebook users' subjective well-being, including measures of self-reported happiness and subjective vitality. To investigate this relationship, we conducted two experimental tests involving actual Facebook user...

The news media’s increased reliance on visual communication to illustrate complex processes and promote learning stresses the importance of investigating how visual content impacts the understanding of scientific issues. In this paper, we investigate how members of the public interpret and make sense of differentially framed images of hydraulic fra...

This study empirically examines the media participation hypothesis advanced by Bucy, analyzing the influence of traditional and participatory media use across six US presidential elections. Multivariate analyses of American National Elections Study data demonstrate that as participatory media become more prevalent and utilized in an electoral syste...

Nonverbal cues consist of those elements of expression that convey social rather than factual information and serve as rich communicative signals carried in all forms of visual or aural media. In media effects research, nonverbal cues have been primarily associated with emotional expression, particularly facial displays, bodily gestures, and voice...

This article asks whether losing in a political debate is associated with a set of visible, empirically verifiable nonverbal indicators that correspond to physical weakness, pronounced stress, evasive or fearful behavior, and other outward signs of secondary or subordinate status. To answer this question, a comparative content analysis of the first...

Research on the visual and nonverbal aspects of political communication is experiencing a renaissance of sorts, expanding the boundaries of an already innovative and dynamic branch of cross-disciplinary scholarship. The articles assembled in this special issue represent the breadth of work now occurring at this vibrant crossroads of scholarly inqui...

The 2016 presidential primary debates attracted a great deal of public and media attention. These debates have become highly anticipated and watched events, stimulating extensive general public interest and interaction and been the focus on ongoing media commentary. Perhaps more important, these early debates not only provide an entry point for vot...

Major political events now unfold in a hybrid political information cycle: even as millions of citizens tune in to television broadcasts, many also comment - and receive others' comments - over social media. In previous research, we have described how biobehavioral cues spur Twitter discussion of candidates during American presidential debates. Her...

Recent decades have witnessed an increased growth in data generated by information, communication, and technological systems, giving birth to the 'Big Data' paradigm. Despite the profusion of raw data being captured by social media platforms, Big Data require specialized skills to parse and analyze - and even with the requisite skills, social media...

As with the first televised debates in 1960, the 2012 US presidential debates accentuated the importance of nonverbal behavior in political competition, with President Obama receiving widespread criticism for his disengaged and arguably inappropriate communication style in the first debate. To investigate the perceptual impact of such nonverbal exp...

Research methods consist of rules and procedures that structure data collection or observations for supporting research and evaluating claims for knowledge. In political communication, research methods facilitate systematic analyses of the press and public sphere, whether relying on nonnumerical interpretation or quantitative inference, for the pur...

The smiles and affiliative expressions of presidential candidates are important for political success, allowing contenders to nonverbally connect with potential supporters and bond with followers. Smiles, however, are not unitary displays; they are multifaceted in composition and signaling intent due to variations in performance. With this in mind,...

The smiles of politicians are considered a key component of their success, allowing them to nonverbally connect with potential voters and strengthen their connection with supporters. Smiles, however, are not unitary displays; they are multifaceted and variant in their intent and what they can accomplish due to variations in the way they may be disp...

There is considerable controversy surrounding the study of presidential debates, particularly efforts to connect their content and impact. Research has long debated whether the citizenry reacts to what candidates say, how they say it, or simply how they appear. This study uses detailed coding of the first 2012 debate between Barack Obama and Mitt R...

This introduction to the special issue on presidential disability and succession focuses on the distinctly positive contributions that invocations of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment have made to American political life since the Amendment's ratification in 1967. It also underlines the importance for Presidents, their family members and aides to understa...

This introduction to the special issue on presidential disability and succession focuses on the distinctly positive contributions that invocations of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment have made to American political life since the Amendment's ratification in 1967. It also underlines the importance for Presidents, their family members and aides to understa...

This paper develops a model of press-priming in which public evaluations of press performance are examined in the context of media scandals where news organizations through their own ethical lapses become the subject and conduit of priming effects. We argue that judgments about the press during a crisis depend on the activation of standing attitude...

With sing . concord. The interaction between politics and biology; spec. (a) politically motivated intervention in the growth or development of a population; (b) the use of biological science to explain human social or political behaviour; (c) environmental policy.

With sing . concord. The interaction between politics and biology; spec. (a) politically motivated intervention in the growth or development of a population; (b) the use of biological science to explain human social or political behaviour; (c) environmental policy.

This study examines the extent to which character advertising and other host-selling practices prevail on popular children’s websites and assesses whether commercial sites geared toward young users are complying with voluntary guidelines calling for a clear separation between advertising and content. A longitudinal analysis of 101 of the most popul...

From the editor: Environmental politics - Volume 30 Issue 2 - Erik P. Bucy

Last fall, the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences (APLS) celebrated its 30th anniversary by holding the annual meeting on the picturesque campus of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. The event was highlighted not only by a keynote address from Nobel Prize Laureate Elinor Ostrom but also featured several roundtables comprised of...

From the editor: Founding reflections - Volume 30 Issue 1 - Erik P. Bucy

Last fall, the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences (APLS) celebrated its 30th anniversary by holding the annual meeting on the picturesque campus of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. The event was highlighted not only by a keynote address from Nobel Prize Laureate Elinor Ostrom but also featured several roundtables comprised of...

Scholarly publication in peer-reviewed journals is widely regarded as the road to scholarly success. However, in a diversity of fields such as sociology, economics, and political science, it has been shown that the rate of publication is much lower for women than for men. The question of whether a systematic relationship exists between gender and r...

In his article from the previous issue of the journal, “Enhancing genetic virtue: A project for twenty-first century humanity?” Mark Walker proposes an interdisciplinary effort between philosophers, psychologists, and geneticists called the Genetic Virtue Program (GVP), whose aim is to employ biotechnology some time into the future to identify gene...

This article demonstrates that candidate positions on the ballot measure to ban gay marriage had an effect on gubernatorial voting. With exit poll data from three states in 2006, we find that the effect of support for the ban is at least twice as large when the candidates adopted divergent positions. Support for the ban has a smaller but significan...

Image Bite Politics is the first book to systematically assess the visual presentation of presidential candidates in network news coverage of elections and to connect these visual images with shifts in public opinion. Presenting the results of a comprehensive visual analysis of general election news from 1992-2004, encompassing four presidential ca...