Week 6 – Gap And Future Research

In my last update, I discussed what I thought my general conclusions would be and the tedious process of interpreting results. Branching off of my conclusions, I wanted to take this week to talk about the future research that could be done to expand upon my project.

My project discovered a very large gap in our understanding of state or local-level debates, as well as how rhetoric demonstrates the will of the populace. I’m offering a lot of suggestions for how someone could take my study, greatly expand the size, and discover much more substantiative conclusions.

The first suggestion would be to expand this study to Democratic candidates as well. I didn’t think that this would be necessary and only apply to other members of Trump’s party, but after flagging Charlie Crist numerous times for lack of specificity and not reporting it in my results because my project was only examining the GOP candidates, I wished I examined both parties. Perhaps it’s plausible the Democratic candidates adopted norm violations as well, thinking they were needed to be competitive.

The second suggestion I provided was to greatly expand my study to include more governor, senate, and even house races to demonstrate the “rhetorical status” of the party or country on a much larger scale. While I do think my four chosen races did a good job of representing a much larger group, I do think more data points would have revealed more. I do think that would open the world to seeing if there was a correlation between norm violation frequency and election success. A sample size of four was too small to come to definitive conclusions.

Third, while I cannot provide the specifics for what a study measuring this would look like, I would like to acknowledge the lack of literature on local or state-level debates and their influence on election success, as well as what they demonstrate about what their state or district may accept and not accept. Previous studies have polled voters while watching presidential debates to discover the answer to similar questions, and perhaps that should be applied to other levels.

That will be it for this week; I expect to discuss the presentation process or the final steps in writing my paper next week. Thanks for reading.