Tag: University of Texas at Austin

It’s not hard to see how President Donald Trump differs from previous presidents. Analysis of communication styles used by American presidents from 1789 to 2018 revealed a consistent decline in “analytical thinking” and a concurrent rise in confidence. The paper’s authors write that their results “strongly suggest that the recipe that likely helped President Trump to become a successful presidential candidate was set in motion almost 100 years before he took office.” Kayla Jordan, a Ph.D. student at the University of Texas at Austin and the study’s first author, began analyzing presidential linguistic trends during the 2016 debates. But when they began to analyze past presidents and politicians from around the world, they found strong linear trends. “All political leaders, not just Trump, have been increasingly communicating in more informal, confident ways,” Jordan tells Inverse. “The only exception was in the election debates, where he was even lower on analytic thinking than what would have been predicted.” Example #1: Announcing ‘Space Force’ To examine this trend, they analyzed all presidential States of the Union and inaugural addresses from the past 229 years and US, Australian, British, and Canadian legislative texts from 1994 to 2016. Around the same time, presidential linguistics began to have more examples of clout. The team notes that voters increasingly shun seemingly elitist or aristocratic politicians, a shift that may have inspired success-seeking politicians to speak more informally. But it’s also possible that because President Trump’s speaking style is the lowest in analytic thinking and highest in confidence in American history, other politicians may actively try to sever this long-term linear trend. Across multiple corpora from the American presidents, non-US leaders, and legislative bodies spanning decades, there has been a general decline in analytic thinking and a rise in confidence in most political contexts, with the largest and most consistent changes found in the American presidency.

A new survey conducted by Jolt Texas, a left-leaning voter mobilization group, found that it may be a combination of factors, including mistrust of the political process and not having enough information about elections, that contributes to low Latino voter turnout in the state. Half of those polled said they feel cynical about politics and a third say they don’t trust politicians. Other responses highlighted a disconnect between respondents and civic participation: Almost 40 percent said they lacked confidence or trust in the political process. But she said that motivating them to get to the polls is the responsibility of candidates and political parties vying for their votes. She said she’s voted in almost every election since 2010. “Go to where we live because if you really want us to turn out for you, then you have to make the effort to come out to us,” Roman said. Earlier this year, a national Quinnipiac poll found that 60 percent of Latino voters in the U.S. said they had not been contacted by a candidate or political party about registering to vote. That cyclical neglect is what keeps many Latinos out of the political process, said Indiana University political science professor Bernard Fraga. “It tells them that their issues are not important enough to be discussed.” Fraga said he feels it’s not too late to communicate with Latinos to get them to go from apathy and mistrust to being fully or somewhat engaged in the political process. Less than half (46 percent) of all Latinos in the state have both citizenship and are over 18 years old.

Harvard University’s decision to hire Elizabeth Warren as a law professor in the 1990s was not based on any assertion that she has Native American heritage, according to a report by the Boston Globe. Elizabeth Warren seeks to use Trump Pocahontas 'racial slur' as political tool Read more Warren is now a US senator from Massachusetts and a possible liberal contender for the Democratic presidential nomination. Donald Trump has repeatedly referred to Warren as “Pocahontas”, mocking her claims of heritage. The Globe reported that interviews and documents show the issue was not considered by Harvard Law faculty or those who admitted Warren to law school at Rutgers or to jobs at the University of Houston, the University of Texas and the University of Pennsylvania. “It was just not an issue. I can’t remember anybody ever mentioning her in this context.” The Globe reported that it examined hundreds of documents, many never before available, and talked to 31 law school professors from that period at Harvard. One said he was unsure if the issue came up, but if it did, it had no bearing on his vote. On Sunday, Warren posted to her website documents related to her job and school applications and again asserted that her heritage played no role in her career advancement. “My family is my family,” she told the Globe. She has repeatedly said she is not running for president in 2020, but continues to position herself as a national leader in the Democratic party.