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Purpose – Within cultural discourse, prescriptions for “good” motherhood exist. To further the analysis of these prescriptions, we examine how media conversations about Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, and First Lady Michelle Obama during the 2008 presidential election campaign illustrate existing notions of good motherhood.Methods – Using qualitative content analysis techniques, we review media discourse about Palin, Clinton, and Obama during this campaign. We use existing feminist literature on motherhood and an intersectionality perspective to ground our analysis, comparing and contrasting discourse about these political figures.Findings – The 2008 campaign represented a campaign for good motherhood as much as it represented a campaign for the next president. Discourse on Palin, Clinton, and Obama creates three very different characterizations of mothers: the bad, working mother and failed supermom (Palin), the unfeeling, absent mother (Clinton), and the intensive, stay-at-home mother (Obama). The campaign reified a very narrow, ideological standard for good motherhood and did little to broaden the acceptability of mothers in politics.Value of paper – This article exemplifies the type of intersectional work that can be done in the areas of motherhood and family. Applying an intersectionality perspective in the analysis of media discourse allows us to see exactly how the 2008 campaign became a campaign for good motherhood. Moreover, until we engage in an intersectional analysis of this discourse, we might not see that the reification of good motherhood within campaign discourse is also a reification of hegemonic gender, race, class, age, and family structure locations.

This chapter explores the media coverage of the 2016 Presidential campaign and reveals the corruption fantasy themes that emerged. Media coverage of corruption can uniquely affect voter attitudes and public policy formulation and implementation, as revealed in previous scholarship on media coverage of corruption. By tracing the competing narratives offered in media coverage utilizing the constant comparative method, the dramatic characters, Crooked Hillary and Corrupt Businessman Trump, are identified and their storylines are explicated. Analysis reveals these dramatic fantasy themes chained through social media, evincing and promoting the narratives that drove media coverage of our political leaders and public policy results. The chapter illustrates that the narratives involving corruption were prominent and negative, further indicating that the media’s obsession with scandal contributed to and supported the narratives that portrayed both candidates as corrupt, adding pollution to the 2016 U.S. political environment.

President Bill Clinton has had many opponents and enemies, most of whom come from the political right wing. Clinton supporters contend that these opponents, throughout the Clinton presidency, systematically have sought to undermine this president with the goal of bringing down his presidency and running him out of office; and that they have sought non‐electoral means to remove him from office, including Travelgate, the death of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster, the Filegate controversy, and the Monica Lewinsky matter. This bibliography identifies these and other means by presenting citations about these individuals and organizations that have opposed Clinton. The bibliography is divided into five sections: General; “The conspiracy stream of conspiracy commerce”, a White House‐produced “report” presenting its view of a right‐wing conspiracy against the Clinton presidency; Funding; Conservative organizations; and Publishing/media. Many of the annotations note the links among these key players.

The purpose of this paper is to examine perceptions of the “Ideal President” (IP) and presidential candidates in the 2016 US presidential election in relation to gender stereotypes and leader prototypes.

In all, 378 business students assessed perceptions of either the IP or a particular candidate on measures of masculinity and femininity. Androgyny (balance of masculinity and femininity) and hypermasculinity (extremely high masculinity) scores were calculated from these measures.

The IP was perceived as higher in masculinity than femininity, but less similar to the male (Donald Trump) than the female (Hillary Clinton) candidate. IP perceptions were more androgynous than in the 2008 US presidential election. Respondents’ political preferences were related to their IP perceptions on hypermasculinity, which in turn were consistent with perceptions of their preferred candidate.

Trump’s high hypermasculinity scores may explain why he won the electoral college vote, whereas Clinton’s being perceived as more similar to the IP, and IP perceptions’ becoming more androgynous over time, may explain why she won the popular vote.

The study extends the literature on the linkages between gender stereotypes and leader prototypes in two respects. Contrary to the general assumption of a shared leader prototype, it demonstrates the existence of different leader prototypes according to political preference. The hypermasculinity construct, which was introduced to interpret leader prototypes in light of Trump’s candidacy and election, represents a valuable addition to the literature with potentially greater explanatory power than masculinity in some situations.

Donald Trump entered the presidency in 2017 with an electoral mandate to reduce US military involvement around the world and to abandon the trade and investment treaties that empowered global corporations. Yet he mostly continued the foreign policies adopted by previous administrations. In recent decades, those policies have increasingly served particularistic elite interests at the expense of the US ruling class as a whole, and they have also been unsuccessful in stemming the decline of US imperial power. This chapter explores the factors that explain this continuity of policy. In analyzing the reasons for policy stasis, it offers an analytical basis to evaluate what might change under President Biden. It also assesses what strategies might be most effective for those who hope to resist US militarism and to undermine the US capacity to enforce a hegemony based on rapacious capitalism.

The leadership of the Iraq and Afghanistan war has been criticized for reported cases of contractor corruption. This chapter examines the extent to which these wars have played out in the political agendas of candidates for President. The hypothesis is that while the two wars continue to be a key campaign issue in election cycles, the corruption narrative is a neglected part of the discourse. There are possible reasons for the disjuncture between United States (U.S.) positions against corruption by foreign governments and contractor behaviors within the defense industry, namely the impact of corruption on voters, candidates and other stakeholders. The chapter closes with lessons about the effects of corruption on agenda setting while also contributing to research on evaluation of private-public partnerships in public policy implementation and governance.

This paper aims to examine how exposure to a presidential candidate's high engagement Instagram images influences a citizen's candidate evaluations.

Data were collected via Amazon MTurk. A 3 × 2 experimental design was employed to test the persuasive effect of exposure of the “most liked” and “most commented on” images of the top four 2016 US presidential primary candidates on a US citizen's candidate evaluation.

Results reveal that highly engaging Instagram images of unfamiliar presidential candidates positively influenced candidate evaluations. However, the same was not true for more well-known presidential candidates.

This study was not conducted during a live campaign and only examined four of the top 2016 presidential primary candidates.

The research includes implications for marketers seeking to increase engagement and reach in Instagram marketing campaigns. This study shows that even brief exposure to a highly engaged post involving an unfamiliar person/product on social media can significantly alter evaluations of that person or product.

To the authors' knowledge, no experimental designs have addressed how Instagram posts influence users' political attitudes and behaviors within the political marketing and communications literature.