Group: Estevan, Phillip, Tatsiana
Group Members: Phillip Bleustein, Estevan Roman, Tatsiana Vashkevich
Name of Group: Group 2 ( Will change in future)
2-3 Historical Questions We are Considering:
- How does the appearance effect the outcome of the presidential election?
- What role does religious affiliation of the candidate play during the candidate campaign?
- What are the boundaries of the exaggerated/unachievable promises during presidential campaign?
A Brief Description of the Expected Scope of Our Project:
- We are hoping that we can create the parallels between common issues and facts that play important role during 2012 presidential elections and other historical presidential elections. This historic perspective may help us to uncover deep issues that truly matter and continue to be a driving force that carries winning candidate to the top.
A List of Challenges and Potential That You Are Having now, or Anticipate as you Work on the Project:
- Not being together for a majority of the project, and having to collaborate our work on our google doc.
- There are always external factor that come in to play unexpectedly and having to embrace those factors and work through them could be a problem at time.
Optional: discuss technologies, formats, and work-flow that you may employ:
- Embedding pics, video, audio, likely all through when applicable.
- Google Docs
- Youtube and Blogger
Religious affiliation should be an interesting angle to look at especially in this campaign (Romney being Mormon..) It may be tough to find boundaries of unachievable promises conveyed by candidates because they all make them.
If the group does decide to focus on religious affiliation, there is (unfortunately) a long history of discrimination against candidates along these lines (see the election of 1928 for example).
It might be difficult to find hard data reflecting opinions on appearance, but would be very interesting to see what you can find on that topic.
Cary raises an important question here: how do you measure how voters respond to the appearance of candidates? In fact, there are multiple changes that need to measured to make sense of the cause and effect behind the phenomenon. I recommend that you break down the question into some of these smaller ones, and brainstorm methods for answering those questions.
How much focus will the past elections get during your research?(compared to 2012)
I think the factor of “appearance” could be a very dense and multi-dimensional subject, looking forward to see how that information could be represented.
That’s right — a multidimensional subject indeed. Keep in mind that not only do you need to represent the information about changing perceptions of candidates based on appearance, you need to explain exactly how and why things changed over time in the role that appearance played. To do this, the group will need to be very precise about what qualifies as “appearance” and define the processes by which appearance influences voters.
Could race/gender be explored with this topic as well? We can see how Palin fared, as compared to Ryan as a VP Rep. ticket (based on appearance) not to mention how Obama appears compared to Mitt.
Even the first ladies can be compared – I mean, looks-wise only Michelle Obama gives a completely different aura than Ann Romney. You can explore what messages these women convey next to their husbands – and how their appearance reflects their roles.
i wonder if someone actually listed all of the presidential “promises” and checked them after each turn, it would be like a “ratemyprofessors” kinda thing.
It’s a interesting look on the election. Looking forward toward this group projects.
Although you pose extremely relevant questions to the 2012 Presidential election. The topics may be too easy to prove and you may have trouble finding a lot of additional thought provoking information.
I may be bias and believe that, appearances matter in elections as proven by Nixon vs. Kennedy, most of America are religious Christians, and exaggerated running platforms are so bad that factcheckers explode after every speech.
It may be interesting if you could string these together in one way or another. It might be a reach, but they all do have some things in common.
Good luck, have fun!
I don’t mean easy as in simple. I meant easy as in agreeable by most people.
This is a very interesting topic. I agree with a lot of the other comments though concerning the ability to get data about facts about appearances. It would be awesome if your group was able to find polls that stated which presidential candidates in the past were voted “more attractive to the public” and correlate that with their election results. Best of luck!
You guys have some very interesting questions. On the third question, particularly how are you guys going to collect data to answer that question?
Great ideas, group 2 (watch out — you better come up with a name quickly or your professors may assign one for you!). I agree with most of the comments and the questions that they raise.
For the third question, are you asking the degree to which voters will accept candidates breaking promises? This needs to be clarified, including the exact processes that you intend to measure.
The next step that I recommend is to conduct some background reading on at least one of the historical questions that you raise. Which of these questions have already been asked by historians? Have they been adequately answered? As you read the secondary literature on the topic, look for models of how historians assess changing opinions among voters? Based on your findings, clarify your question(s) to be more specific about the limits of your study– e.g., what years will you be looking at. Why those years?
Religious affiliation looks like it’s gonna play a much larger role but for a myriad of reasons. Since there’s a good likelihood it’s not going to be black and white due to dislike of religion as opposed to supporting one of one’s own, how is this difference going to be noted?
So, Religious affiliation looks like it’s gonna play a much larger role but for a myriad of reasons. Since there’s a good likelihood it’s not going to be black and white due to dislike of religion as opposed to supporting one of one’s own, how is this difference going to be noted?