Caveat orator: Audience disaffiliation in the 1988 presidential debates

Abstract

This paper examines the intersection between speech and the collective behavior of the audience in the 1988 U.S. presidential debates. More specifically, it concerns those audience responses which were unfavorable or disaffiliative in character: booing and disaffiliative laughter. Each response type occurred regularly in a delimited range of speech environments. Booing was restricted to environments in which a candidate was derisively criticizing the opposition; specifically, booing occurred only when a criticism could be regarded as somehow improper or when others had begun to respond favorably to it. Disaffiliative laughter occurred when the candidates were talking about themselves, most commonly when a candidate was responding inadequately to criticism voiced earlier. Various rhetorical maneuvers were thus differentially vulnerable to specific forms of audience disaffiliation.

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