Roderick P. Hart

Roderick P. Hart (born February 17, 1945, Fall River, Massachusetts, U.S.) is an American scholar noted for his work in the areas of political language, media and politics, presidential studies, and rhetorical analysis. He invented a computer-aided text-analysis program called DICTION to assist in his work. The program measures a text’s certainty (number of words indicating “resoluteness, inflexibility, and completeness, and a tendency to speak ex cathedra”), activity (words of “movement, change, the implementation of ideas and the avoidance of inertia”), optimism (words that endorse or are positive or supportive), realism (words that indicate the “tangible, immediate, recognizable matters”), and commonality (words that emphasize “agreed-upon values of a group”).

Hart received a B.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts and an M.A. and Ph.D. in speech communication from Pennsylvania State University. After graduating from Penn State, Hart joined the faculty at Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana, where he served as an assistant professor (1970–74) and associate professor (1974–79) of communication. In 1979 he was appointed a full professor at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin. From 2004 to 2015 he was dean of the Moody College of Communication at UT.

Hart’s rhetorical analyses, often of political texts, had considerable influence in political communication. The Sound of Leadership: Presidential Communication in the Modern Age (1987) and Campaign Talk: Why Elections Are Good for Us (2000) carefully blended two approaches (a sensitivity to individual texts and the rigour of large-scale human and computerized content analyses) to ask and answer fundamental questions about politics, language, and culture.

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The Sound of Leadership analyzed nearly 10,000 public-speaking events over the course of eight U.S. presidencies, examining not only what politicians said but also why they said what they said and when and where they said it. That approach led Hart to conclude that presidents were speaking more and saying less, largely as speech-making became a tool of barter and the speech act became a political favour and a moment for aggrandizement.

In Campaign Talk, Hart employed his DICTION program to analyze the political voices of presidential candidates, journalists, and citizens as they appeared in campaign discourse (speeches, debates, television advertisements, television and print news coverage, and letters to the editor in local newspapers) over the course of 13 presidential elections (1948–96). Use of that method yielded macro-level patterns previously unexamined. The most-notable revelations were that candidate discourse was hopeful, media discourse was focused, and campaign settings forced elites to be far more transparent than they were otherwise. Those offerings were supported by the use of quantitative patterns and illustrative textual examples from candidates, news coverage, and citizen voices.

Hart’s Seducing America: How Television Charms the Modern Voter (rev. ed., 1999) asked what effect television had on citizenship in the United States. In attempting to reconstruct how Americans listened to and felt about televised politics, he contended that television miseducated the citizenry and made that miseducation attractive. He specifically found that television inspired sentiments that were harmful to political life. Among his other books are Modern Rhetorical Criticism (3rd ed., 2005, with Suzanne Daughton), The Political Pulpit Revisited (2005, with John L. Pauley; revised edition of Political Pulpit, 1977), and Political Tone: How Leaders Talk and Why (2013, with Jay P. Childers and Colene J. Lind). In addition to teaching, writing, and editing, Hart founded the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life at UT.