THE DEVELOPMENT OF A MORAL PANIC: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF IMMIGRATION RHETORIC SURROUNDING THE 2012 AND THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS
Open Access
- Author:
- Plummer, Madison
- Area of Honors:
- International Politics
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Mark Gerald Major, Thesis Supervisor
Dr. Matthew Richard Golder, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- Presidential Election
Content Analysis
Political Science
American Politics
Donald Trump
Immigration
Moral Panic
Public Opinion - Abstract:
- The 2016 presidential election emphasized the growing divide in our nation as people favored one side and hated the other. One of the most notable events of during the course of the election occurred on June 16, 2015, when Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president of the United States and touched on issues that became the cornerstone of his campaign, one being immigration. The work presented in this thesis provides thorough analysis of the 2016 presidential election and how it framed immigration, in order to understand how the growing racial divide that impacts our country both at a national scale and individual level. This paper seeks to answer the following question: In what way did presidential rhetoric surrounding immigration change electorate attitudes in the later start of the 21st century (i.e., 2012 and 2016 presidential elections)? Using the framework of a moral panic, I amassed data by performing a content analysis of original documents pertaining to the 2016 Republican presidential campaign, including presidential rhetoric and mass media reports, and compared them to documents from the 2012 Republican presidential campaign, to emphasize the salience and difference of this topic over time. I further this analysis by including an analysis of public opinion data throughout the course of the campaign. My findings support the idea that immigration was not only more salient in the 2016 presidential election by the primary GOP candidate than in 2012, but immigration was framed more negatively than the previous election cycle as well; supporting the hypothesis that a moral panic occurred. I conclude that these negative frames did affect the overall attitude of the American electorate through a case evidence, even though a multivariate regression resulted as insignificant.