having published more than 50 academic articles, book chapters, and public research papers as well as provided commentary for national and local news outlets.
Kevin Coe is a Professor of Communication at the University of Utah. He has published more than 50 academic articles and chapters, and is the coauthor of The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America.
Scacco and Coe applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, The Ubiquitous Presidency: Presidential Communication and Digital Democracy in Tumultuous Times, and reported the following:
Page 99 of The Ubiquitous Presidency sets up a case study examining the influence of then-President Barack Obama’s discussion of health care, specifically the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA, often called “Obamacare”). We explain it this way: “Our interest is in understanding if and how Obama was able to break through the noise and influence the communicative environment during the first two ACA open enrollment periods.” We do this through a semantic network analysis looking at the connections that exist between the language Obama used in tweets about the ACA and the language that news organizations and the public used.Learn more about The Ubiquitous Presidency at the Oxford University Press website.
Does the page 99 test work in this case? Not directly. This page introduces a single case study (of Obama’s communication about the ACA) within a chapter that is also a single case study (of the role Obama played in transforming the presidency). Although the Obama case does reflect how presidents, in general, can use digital technology in attempts to influence segments of the population (one argument in the book), the full work is much more expansive in scope than any one president, outreach approach, or outcome. We include detailed case studies of Obama and Trump, but our focus in most of the book is on over-time trends—in presidential communication, news coverage, and U.S. culture.
The book’s argument, which inspires the Obama example on page 99, is that the traditional “rhetorical presidency” has given way to something different: the ubiquitous presidency. The ubiquitous presidency is a way of explaining the contemporary presidency, especially the significant changes it has undergone over the past several decades. “Ubiquity” signals that contemporary presidents create a nearly constant and highly visible communicative presence in political and nonpolitical arenas through the use of mass as well as targeted media. They do this to achieve longstanding goals, namely visibility, adaptation, and control. But, in an environment where accessibility, personalization, and pluralism have become omnipresent considerations, the strategies presidents use to achieve these goals are very different from what we once knew. We chronicle this important shift through analyses of thousands of presidential speeches, large Twitter datasets, two national surveys, and an experiment. The results help make sense of why the presidency today feels so different from what we once knew.
--Marshal Zeringue
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