CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE Bernie Versus

CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE

Bernie versus Hillary and the Battle for the Soul of The Democratic Party: A Frame

Analysis of Campaign Speeches in the 2016 Democratic Primary

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

For the degree of Master of Arts

in Sociology

Jonathan Rich

August 2018

The thesis of Jonathan Rich is approved:

______

Dr. Moshoula Capous-Desyllas Date

______

Dr. Lauren McDonald Date

______

Dr. Scott Appelrouth, Chair Date

California State University, Northridge

iii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Signature Page…………………………………………………...……………………... iii

List of Figures……………………………………………………………………...…… vii

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………….... viii

Introduction………………………………………………………………………….....… 1

Literature Review………………………………………………………………………… 3

Neoliberalism………………………………………………………………...... 3

Neoliberal Policy Agenda...………………..……………...…..…………. 4

Neoliberal Governmentality………………………………………..…… 10

Neoliberalism’s History and Intellectual Origins……………………………..... 11

Third Way Politics…………………………………………………...…. 16

The Legitimation Crisis of Neoliberalism…………………………...…………. 20

Crisis of System Integration…………………………………………….. 21

Crisis of Social Integration…………………………………………...… 26

Resistance to Neoliberalism………………………………..…………… 28

Progressive Neoliberalism.…………………………………………...… 31

Party Elites and the Presidential Nomination Process……………………..…… 35

History of Presidential Nominations……………………………………. 35

The Modern Presidential Nomination System………………………….. 38

2016 Democratic Party Primary Campaign…………………………………….. 42

Conclusion………………………………………………………………...……. 45

Theoretical Background and Research Methods…………………………………..…… 47

iv Theoretical Background………………………………………………………… 47

Frame Analysis………………………………………..………………... 48

Issue Framing…………………………………………………………… 48

Collective Action Frames………………………………………………. 51

Research Methods………………………………………………………………. 53

Research Questions…………………………………………………...… 53

Study Design……………………………………………………………. 53

Data Analysis Procedure………………………………………………... 57

Findings and Discussion………………………………………………...……………… 63

Issue Salience…………………………………………………………….....…... 63

Education Salience……………………………………………………… 65

Health Care Salience …………………………………………...... ….… 66

Wall Street Salience…………………………………………………..… 69

Issue Orientation ……………………………………………..………………… 71

Education Orientation ………………………………………………..… 71

Health Care Orientation…………………...……………………….…… 79

Wall Street Orientation…………………...…………………………….. 86

Discussion………………………………………………………………………. 96

Implications……………………………………………………...……… 96

Limitations…………………………………………………………...... 100

Future Research……………………...…………………..……………. 103

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………...…..…. 106

References…………………………………………………………………………...… 107

v Appendix.….……………………….……………………………………………..…… 124

vi LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Core Elements of the Neoliberal Policy Agenda ……………………………… 5

Figure 2: The Neoliberal Crisis of Legitimation ….…………………………...….……. 21

Figure 3: Total Issue Salience Scores ………………….………,,,,,……………...….... 62

Figure 4: Education Salience by Date …………………….……………………………. 65

Figure 5: Health Care Salience by Date ………………….………….………………..... 67

Figure 6: Wall Street Salience by Date ……………...………….……...... …………….. 70

Figure 7: Education Orientation by Date …………………...………………………….. 72

Figure 8: Health Care Orientation by Date …………………………………………….. 80

Figure 9: Wall Street Orientation by Date ……………..…………………….……….... 86

vii ABSTRACT

Bernie versus Hillary and the Battle for the Soul of The Democratic Party: A Frame

Analysis of Campaign Speeches in the 2016 Democratic Primary

Jonathan Rich

Master of Arts in Sociology

This research project offers a frame analysis of the 2016 Democratic Party presidential primaries using a content analysis of speeches delivered by Hillary Clinton and Bernie

Sanders during their respective campaign. The 2016 election can be characterized as an intra-party insurgency campaign pitting democratic socialism against the neoliberal establishment. This research situates the 2016 Democratic primary in the context of severe economic recessions that have called into question the legitimacy of neoliberal orthodoxy. This has opened the space for a challenge to neoliberalism within the

Democratic Party. The results reveal that education, health care, and Wall Street reform were salient issues discussed by the candidates using diagnostic and prognostic frames.

viii INTRODUCTION

The principle argument of this research project is that the 2016 Democratic Party primary campaign between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders represented a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party as it struggled to develop a coherent response to the ongoing legitimation crisis of neoliberalism. The evidence for this crisis can be seen in the tide of criticism aimed at “elites” and “the establishment” that has been growing across Western democracies. This anti-establishment turn, I argue in this thesis, is the result of a growing awareness on the part of the populace of the failures of neoliberal capitalism to follow through on its promises of growth and shared prosperity, coupled with an awareness that mainstream political parties have been complicit in upholding this system for decades. The 2007-08 global financial crisis brought the contradictions of neoliberalism to the forefront of public consciousness and frustration with political inaction led to an increased disaffection with the system. These frustrations played themselves out in the political arena in 2016 in a battle between establishment and populist insurgency political campaigns. The primary campaign was intense and at times bitter and acrimonious between the two candidates and their supporters, pointing to tensions between the party’s neoliberal and democratic socialist wings. This research project explores these intra-party tensions by analyzing how the Clinton and Sanders campaigns framed three policy issues in relation to neoliberalism and democratic socialism. The three issues I use to examine candidate framing are health care, education, and Wall Street.

The general outline for this thesis is as follows: first, I offer a literature review exploring the background of the topic. This literature review focuses on the core features

1 of neoliberalism, the conditions that are leading to its crisis of legitimacy, and resistance to neoliberalism by the voting public, particularly in the context of the 2016 presidential election. In the next chapter, I offer a brief theoretical discussion of frame analysis with a focus on collective action frames and issue framing. Next, I turn to a discussion of my research methods, which relied on a mixed-method approach that blended quantitative and qualitative content analyses. A quantitative content analysis was used to establish the saliency of the three issues to each candidate. In this section, I also explore how issue salience changed throughout the course of the campaign. Next, I discuss the qualitative methods used to determine the candidate’s orientation towards the three major policy issues in relation to neoliberalism and democratic-socialism. Orientations towards the three issues were determined based on a qualitative analysis of the diagnostic and prognostic framing devices used in campaign speeches. Diagnostic framing is applied to deal with identifying causes and assigning blame for the issues of education, health care, and Wall Street, while prognostic framing is used to propose solutions to resolve these issues.

In the next chapter, I turn to a discussion of the findings from my study around issue salience and issue orientation in relation to neoliberalism and democratic socialism.

In this chapter, I use quantitative data to illustrate issue salience while employing qualitative analysis to explore the candidates’ orientation towards the three issues. Then, I discuss the implications of my findings, along with some of the limitations and opportunities for future research. In the concluding chapter, I briefly summarize the contributions my research project has for the scholarship on resistance to neoliberalism, intra-party insurgency campaigns, the 2016 election, and issue framing.

2 LITERATURE REVIEW

A review of the relevant literature provides crucial context to buttress the analysis offered in the present study. In order to empirically analyze the battle for the soul of the

Democratic Party, it is crucial to first explore the literature on the social and historical conditions that have brought about the crisis within the Democratic Party. A review of the literature also provides key insights into the socioeconomic ideologies of neoliberalism and democratic socialism, which is critical to understanding the competing policy positions of the Clinton and Sanders campaigns in the 2016 Democratic Party primary. A common theme that appears throughout the literature is that neoliberalism remains the dominant socioeconomic ideology in the two major political parties and has increasingly taken over resistance movements and the nonprofit sector. However, a review of the literature indicates that neoliberalism has entered a crisis of legitimacy and is producing discontent among the voting public. Previous research has situated the 2016 presidential election in the context of the crisis of neoliberalism, connecting the rise of the Sanders campaign to growth in “anti-establishment” sentiment among the voting public. However, there have not yet been any detailed empirical investigations into issue framing between Clinton and Sanders during the Democratic primary. This thesis fills a gap in the literature by providing an empirical analysis of the issue framing processes as it relates to the ideological battle between neoliberalism and democratic socialism in the

2016 Democratic Party primary.

Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism is a complex and multifaceted concept that has been subject to several different scholarly interpretations and analyses. Scholarship on the subject covers

3 a diverse array of perspectives, including psychology (Hari 2018), economics (Young

2011), urban planning (Harvey 2009; Berry 2014), and cultural studies (Gilbert 2016;

McGuigan 2016). This has led Rodgers (2018) to argue that the term neoliberalism has lost its analytical precision, as it is has come to refer to countless dimensions of social life, and therefore should be abandoned in favor of new terminology. In response, several scholars have argued in favor of the continued use of neoliberalism as an analytical concept, on the grounds that neoliberalism can be distinguished as both a specific period in capitalism’s historical development and a coherent set of ideas and policies regarding the role of markets in social life (Ott 2018; Shenk 2018). Following the latter, neoliberalism can be broadly defined as a social, political, and economic regime that seeks to advance a set of policy measures that support free market capitalism and the interests of global corporate actors (Harvey 2005; Bonanno 2017). Since its emergence in the late 1970’s, the influence of neoliberalism has extended across the cultural, political, and economic landscapes, transforming virtually all domains of social life along market lines (Connell 2010).

The present study focuses on two distinctive dimensions of neoliberalism that are commonly explored in the literature. The first dimension highlights neoliberalism as support for a set of policy issues, such as deregulation packages and global free trade initiatives. The second highlights neoliberalism as a governing rationality that has come to pervade economic and non-economic spheres of social life. This second dimension refers not to any specific set of policies, but rather to a cultural mindset that imposes market logic and rationality onto the operation of major institutions and informs the discourses that shape our everyday lives (Braedley and Luxton 2010). In the sections that

4 follow, I offer an analysis of these two salient dimensions of neoliberalism: policy agenda and governing rationality.

Neoliberal Policy Agenda

One way to think of neoliberalism is as support for a particular political and economic policy agenda designed to expand global markets and restructure domains of social life under the purview of the marketplace (Connell 2010). As can be seen in Figure

1, the neoliberal policy agenda includes four core elements: privatization, deregulation, liberalization, and incarceration (Steger and Roy 2010).

Deregulation

Incarceration Neoliberalism Privatization

Liberalization

Figure 1: Core Elements of the Neoliberal Policy Agenda Privatization involves a process of turning over government programs to private, for profit business (Young 2011). As a result, the maintenance of public infrastructure and the provision of vital social services are being driven by the pursuit of private profit rather than by serving the public interest (Chomsky 1999; Brown 2015). Deregulation is a related policy goal under neoliberalism. This involves the reduction of government rules

5 and guidelines that regulate the behavior of the private sector, as well as the defunding or elimination of government regulatory agencies (Steger and Roy 2010). Since neoliberalism views government regulations as an obstacle to free market competition, deregulation is promoted as a means of removing unnecessary government interference and unleashing economic growth, which is believed to benefit the general public (Bradley and Luxton 2010).

Liberalization involves the process of eliminating barriers to corporate free trade and the establishment of international governmental organizations to manage and oversee the flow of capital across national boundaries (Davies 2014; Bonanno 2017). This process makes existing markets wider and allows for the creation of new markets in territories, countries, and regions of the world where markets had not previously existed

(Connell 2010; Davies 2014). This global expansion of capital has been facilitated by international governmental organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which shape global economic relations according to the interests of global corporate actors (Chomsky 1999;

Harvey 2005). These international organizations impose neoliberal economic policies onto poorer countries throughout the Global South in service of the interests of global financial elites and wealthy Western nations (Fraser 2017). This is accomplished using structural adjustment programs. Whenever a country experiences an economic crisis, the

IMF and the World Bank offers to bail them out on the condition that the country adopt free market policies, including devaluing the national currency against the dollar, lifting import and export restrictions, balancing national budgets, and deregulation (Chomsky

1999). The IMF and World Bank officially bill structural adjustment programs as poverty

6 reduction tools. And it is indeed true that countries benefit from IMF and World Bank loans in the short-run, as these loans allow countries to stabilize their economies and experience a growth in foreign investment (Steger and Roy 2010). However, if countries failed to implement neoliberal free market policies, the IMF and World Bank can subject them to severe fiscal discipline, undermining their economic self-determination by locking the country in a cycle of debt and dependency (Villaroman 2009). The result is that debt has become a major disciplinary mechanism used to maintain and expand neoliberalism both internationally and domestically (Crouch 2013). Structural adjustment loans, as noted above, use debt to eliminate trade barriers and remove regulations that are a potential barrier to corporate investment. Debt plays a major role in the domestic context as well. For instance, roughly 80 percent of the US population is trapped in some form of debt, whether it be from mortgages, student loans, auto loans, or other sources

(Pew Charitable Trust 2015). Mahmud (2012) argues that this widespread debt functions as a form of social control, encouraging passivity and obedience among the workforce.

In cases where a country’s compliance with neoliberal market expansions cannot be ensured through IMF and World Bank loans, neoliberalism has been imposed through military force, either through regime change wars, or through internal coup d'états. One early example of this phenomenon is Chile. In 1970, Salvador Allende, a Marxist, was elected president of Chile on a platform that called for the nationalization of major industries, including copper mining, banks, and foreign assets (Blum 1995). In 1973, the

US government orchestrated a coup d’état, overthrowing President Allende and installing military general Augusto Pinochet to power (Chomsky 1999). During Pinochet’s reign,

Chile implemented several neoliberal policies, such as the privatization of state owned

7 enterprises and the removal of tariffs and other obstacles to foreign investment (Klein

2007). Pinochet’s economic policies were heavily influenced by Milton Friedman and

Chicago School economists (Chomsky 1999). For this reason, Chile has been referred to as the “laboratory test” of neoliberal economic policies (Krugman 1994).

Klein (2007) has also pointed out that US policy makers rely on disasters such as extreme weather events, wars, or economic crises to impose neoliberal measures to aid in the rebuilding of the damaged country as a form of “economic shock therapy.” For instance, Klein (2007) cites the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq’s infrastructure after the 2003 invasion as an example of neoliberal shock therapy. During the occupation of Iraq, a significant number of security measures and military operations were delegated out to private military contractors, such as Blackwater. The rebuilding of Iraq’s infrastructure was also contracted out to private companies, and services previously run by the Iraqi government were converted to private businesses (Klein 2007). It is for this reason that Galbraith (2018) has argued that governments under neoliberalism can best be characterized as “predator states” that often resort to looting and plundering entire nations to expand corporate profit.

This brings us to the final piece of the neoliberal policy package, which is the expansion of the carceral state (Usmani 2017). Under neoliberalism, the carceral state has come to replace the welfare state as the primary means of managing social inequality

(Hinton 2016). As neoliberal policy makers dismantle the social safety net through privatization and deregulation, the prison system becomes the primary means used by the state to address the realities of the urban and rural underclass (Johnson 2017). The result is that neoliberal states must rely heavily on punitive strategies to control the segments of

8 the population that have been ravaged by neoliberal policies that have led to deindustrialization, job losses, and a precarious labor market (Hinton 2016).

The expansion of the carceral state under neoliberalism can be demonstrated by looking at historical trends in US incarceration rates. From 1925 to 1972, the US incarceration rate remained relatively stable with an average rate of 110 per 100,000 population, but beginning in 1973, the rate began to increase (National Research Council

2014). The incarceration rate reached 707 per 100,000 in 2012, more than four times the rate it had been in 1973 (Eisen and Chettiar 2016). In absolute numbers, there were 2.2 million people in US prisons and jails in 2012, yielding a rate of incarceration higher than any other country in the world (National Research Council 2014).

The expansion of the carceral state has also been a highly-racialized process, disproportionately targeting the black community (Alexander 2012). The National

Research Council (2014) notes that although incarceration rates have risen for both black and white Americans since 1973, the incarceration rate for blacks has grown much more rapidly than for whites. For example, in 2016, African-Americans were incarcerated at a rate of 1,608 per 100,000 population, while whites were incarcerated at a rate of 274 per

100,000 (Pew Research Center 2018). However, Gottschalk (2016) has pointed out that the incarceration rate of 274 per 100,000 for white Americans, while low in comparison to African-Americans, is higher than other Organization for Economic Co-Operation and

Development (OECD) countries, which have an average incarceration rate of 115 per

100,000. But the astronomically high incarceration rates among African-Americans have had devastating impacts on the black community, leading many scholars to draw parallels between mass incarceration and Jim Crow segregation, arguing that the expansion of the

9 carceral state has been used as a form of social control against black people, resulting in the preservation of a white racial caste system (Alexander 2012).

Neoliberal Governmentality

These four elements of the neoliberal economic policy package help paint a picture of what the supporters of neoliberalism’s policy goals are. But neoliberalism goes much deeper than a set of policies: it is a way of thinking about and understanding the world. According to Foucault (2008), neoliberalism is essentially a “governmentality,” a set of values, tenets, and logics that inform our approach to governance itself. Neoliberal governmentality applies the logic of market calculation not only to the management of the affairs of the state, but also to virtually all major economic and non-economic institutions in contemporary society, including education (Baltodano 2012), non-profit organizations (Bananno 2017), religious institutions (Gauthier 2017), and health-care

(Maskovsky 2000). As a result, the entrepreneurial values of individual competition and pursuit of self-interest have come to be the dominant standards for the functioning of all major social institutions (Laval and Dardot 2013; Steger and Roy 2009). Under neoliberalism, the profit-seeking corporation is promoted as the ideal model for the public sector and civil society (Bradley and Luxton 2010). As a result, the state is run as a business, the university as a factory, and the non-governmental organization as a multinational corporation (Brown 2015; Rodgers 2018).

Neoliberalism does not stop at transforming the mode of governance of social institutions. Neoliberal governmentality persuades individuals to govern themselves through the model of individual competition promoted through the market (Bratich,

Packer, and McCarthy 2003). It is in this sense that the governing rationality of the

10 marketplace penetrates not only institutions, but the individual as well (Bennett 2003).

Under neoliberalism, identity, lifestyle, and the self all become commodities to be bought and sold on the marketplace (Nguyen 2017). The neoliberal governing rationality encourages individuals to view their very selves as brands to be marketed and promoted

(Laval and Dardot 2013). This notion of the self as commodity reproduces neoliberalism’s core logic: that individuals can only realize their potential through the pursuit of self-interest in the market economy (Harvey 2005). This can be seen in the rise of social media, which encourages people to reconstruct the self as a ‘brand’ for the purpose of impression management on social media websites (Roberts 2014). In many ways, contemporary resistance movements against neoliberalism tend to focus on individual empowerment and socially conscious consumerism rather than mobilizing a mass movement with the power to challenge neoliberal policies (Bonanno 2017; Fraser

2017). This point will be returned to and further elaborated on. Next, I will discuss neoliberalism’s history as an intellectual project and the socioeconomic conditions that led to its establishment as the dominant paradigm in Washington.

Neoliberalism’s History and Intellectual Origins

Steger and Roy (2010) divide the development of modern capitalism into three distinct periods. The first period was defined by the ideology of classical liberalism, which saw both individual rights and the free market competition as products of natural law, and advocated for limiting the power of the state to matters of protecting individual liberty and ensuring free exchange (Bonanno 2017). Thus, classical liberals saw the free market economy as a means of maximizing individual liberty. Classical liberalism was rooted in the theories of Adam Smith ([1776] 2009), who argued that unregulated

11 economic exchange between free individuals would ensure the most efficient and effective allocation of resources while enhancing the economic freedom of all.

Because the classical liberal tradition emphasized free exchange, many have characterized capitalism during this period as laissez-faire (“hands off”). However, capitalism in the United States and elsewhere never truly operated free from government oversight and regulation. One example of this is the federal government instituting tariffs as a means of controlling foreign trade. The US government also played a vital role in building the nation’s infrastructure through land purchases and giveaways, the

Homestead Act, the Pony Express, and other land grants throughout the nineteenth century (Coontz 1993). Nonetheless, capitalism during late nineteenth century produced widespread poverty, creating vast urban slums while enriching a handful of wealthy industrialists, disdainfully referred to as “robber barons.” Financial crashes were relatively common during this period. Between 1800 and World War II, the US economy experienced eight major depressions (Kangas 1997). By the time the Great Depression hit, the legitimacy of classical liberalism and the doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism was thrown into crisis (Steger and Roy 2010).

As the Great Depression worsened, the government’s insistence that the market will correct itself without government intervention seemed increasingly untenable. As a result, the government adopted Keynesian economic policies, named after British economist John Maynard Keynes, who argued that capitalism had to be subject to certain regulations and controls by the state (Krugman 1994). Keynes argued for massive government spending in times of economic crisis. This led to the age of welfare state capitalism (Steger and Roy 2010). Welfare state capitalism was a time of economic

12 growth and prosperity shared relatively broadly across the population (Krugman 1994).

This period was characterized by increased spending on social welfare programs, high marginal tax-rates on the wealthy, and a heavily unionized workforce. The economy during this period operated under a system known as “Fordism,” named after businessman Henry Ford. The Fordist economic model was characterized by industrialized factory labor and the mass production of consumer products (Bonanno

2017). This period was characterized by high wages, strong labor unions, and a large and growing middle-class (Steger and Roy 2010).

In the decades that followed the second world war, support for the welfare state was so strong that even Richard Nixon was said to have remarked, “we are all

Keynesians now,” indicating the support that welfare state capitalism held in both parties

(Krugman 1994). However, by the end of the 1970’s, the welfare state model was experiencing a crisis of legitimacy (Habermas 1976). The economy in the late 1970’s was characterized by high rates of inflation and low rates of growth, known as “stagflation.”

Krugman (1994) notes that stagflation was primarily the result of two phenomena: soaring oil prices from oil exporting countries and shortages in food harvest, both of which led US companies to inflate prices. In addition, since the 1960’s, the Federal

Reserve had been pursuing an expansionist monetary policy that accepted high inflation in return for low unemployment, which ultimately resulted in businesses raising prices rather than hiring more workers (Kangas 1997). Welfare state capitalism struggled to generate the mechanisms needed to reproduce itself as a system, resulting in the implementation of neoliberalism as a replacement (Steger and Roy 2010).

13 According to Habermas (1975), welfare state capitalism entered a state of crisis because the state proved unable to control the market while balancing its role as a mediator between labor and the capitalist class. For Habermas (1975), this was primarily due to attempts by the state to manage the wage structure, which produced inflation that eroded the benefits of wage increases. Bonanno (2017) built on this argument by noting that welfare state capitalism established a socioeconomic climate of workplace stability and security that paradoxically pacified class relations and led to a replacement of the socialist vision of revolutionary working class struggle with widespread acceptance of capitalism as a vehicle for economic growth, which strengthened the power of capital.

Welfare state capitalism entered a state of crisis due to these forces, and the state ultimately proved unable to balance its role as mediator between labor and capital. As a result, US political leaders and the Federal Reserve began to retreat from Keyensian economics (Krugman 1994). This is why, according to Foucault, governments adopted neoliberalism as a way to relieve the state from its role as regulator of the economy and restore the private market to primacy (Zamora and Behrent 2016).

The term neoliberalism suggests a reimagining of the model of classical liberalism proposed by Adam Smith. Although a full history of neoliberalism’s ideological history and intellectual development is beyond the scope of this study, it should be noted that neoliberalism has a few key differences from its classical predecessor. One major difference is that neoliberalism contains a “missionary faith” to bring the logic of the market to bear on seemingly every facet of social life, rather than just the economic sphere, the implications of which are magnified under the conditions of globalization and the endless expansion of capital (Bradley and Luxton 2010; Steger and

14 Roy 2010). This was not the case for proponents of classical liberalism, who supported markets as a tool to maximize individual liberty rather than as a means for the endless expansion of capital. Another key difference is that the classical liberal tradition conceptualized markets as a product of nature, while proponents of neoliberalism recognize the constructed character of markets and advocate for state intervention to create and expand marketplaces (Bonanno 2017).

Although there is a long lineage of thinkers that developed neoliberalism, the two most significant shapers of the doctrine are Milton Friedman and Gary Becker, two economists who were associated with the University of Chicago (Bonanno 2017).

Friedman’s focused on monetary policy and called for a minimalist state whose primary purpose was to protect market competition. Becker’s work focused on providing an economic approach to understanding human behavior. He helped develop a behavioral model known as “homo economicus,” that is rooted in the idea that individuals are motivated by self-interest and rational calculation. Becker held that all types of human behavior – including noneconomic behaviors – can be explained by the idea of maximizing economic utility (Krugman 1994). Thus, homo economicus provides a form of economic rationality to help legitimize neoliberal domination (Bonanno 2017).

The policy ideas of the Chicago school economists won the support of the Reagan administration, who soon began to implement neoliberal measures (Steger and Roy

2010). Although most research credits Reagan with first putting neoliberal policies in place, it should be noted that many aspects of the neoliberal regime began under the

Carter administration. During his term in office, President Carter slashed the top income tax-rates and deregulated several key industries, including trucking, airlines, railroads,

15 and oil (Zinn 2005). However, the Reagan administration significantly expanded the neoliberal policy agenda, including lowering marginal tax rates, reducing regulations, cutting government spending, and implementing a noninflationary monetary policy

(Young 2011).

Third Way Politics

The implementation of neoliberal policies during the Reagan years produced a number of consequences that severely weakened the political left (Zinn 2005). Reagan’s policies led to a drastic reduction in social spending and severely weakened labor unions, who saw a steady decline in membership during the Reagan-Bush years (Harvey 2005).

With the end of the Soviet Union and the discrediting of socialist and communist ideologies, the left began to rethink its political project. This led to the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton moving in a new direction known as “third way” politics in the early

1990’s (Bonanno 2017). The most influential proponent of third way politics was the nonprofit organization the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and its think-tank, the

Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), which were made up of several Democratic senators and party leaders who advocated for the party to move towards the center-right (Steger and Roy 2010). In 1992, the DLC released a policy document that served as the blueprint for third way politics and the future direction of the Democratic Party (Geismer 2016). In this policy document, the DLC rejected New Deal liberalism’s focus on wealth redistribution and welfare programs in favor of a socially conscious free-market agenda

(Geismer and Lassiter 2018).

The newly elected President Clinton was an avid proponent of the DLC’s third way politics, as it was his belief that capitalism could be combined with minimal welfare

16 provisions and greater corporate social responsibility to unleash economic growth and prosperity to all (Fraser 2017). For example, while serving in the White House, Clinton regularly convened roundtable discussions with corporate executives to promote good business practices and instill the idea that companies can make a profit through socially responsible behavior (Eichar 2015). The Clinton administration did this in two primary ways. First, Clinton encouraged businesses to increase their commitment to philanthropy.

As a result, charitable giving increased 43 percent from 1993 to 1999 (The Clinton-Gore

Administration Record of Progress 2000). After Clinton left the White House, this commitment to corporate philanthropy would continue with the Clinton Foundation, which allowed the Clintons to build a vast network of individual and corporate donors that could be relied upon to finance Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016, a point which I shall return to later (Gold, Hamburger, and Narayanswamy 2015). Second,

Clinton promoted public-private partnerships as a model for addressing social problems.

One example of this was Clinton’s Digital Divide initiative, which offered tax breaks to incentivize tech companies to expand access to computer and the internet in public schools in partnership with nonprofit organizations and the federal government (Clinton

Administration Cabinet 2001).

Clinton’s embrace of third way politics, which has been referred to as “socially conscious market globalism” by Steger and Roy (2010:50), stressed the link between expanding global commerce and building a more just and peaceful world. By embracing third way politics, Clinton shifted the Democratic Party’s base away from organized labor to socially conscious affluent suburban professionals and high-tech entrepreneurs

(Geismer and Lassiter 2018). In doing so, the Clinton presidency presided over the period

17 in which the Democratic Party leadership fully embraced neoliberalism (Bonanno 2017;

Braedley and Luxton 2010).

When Clinton came into office, he declared that “the era of big government is over” and began a process of deregulation and privatization under the banner of

“reinventing government” (Steger and Roy 2010:51). One example of this was Clinton’s major overhaul of the welfare system, based on his campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it” (Brown 2015). In 1996, President Clinton replaced the Aid to Families with

Dependent Children program, which had been in place since 1935, with new legislation that imposed time limits and work requirements on welfare recipients (Nguyen 2017).

The push for welfare reform was highly racialized, relying on “dog whistle” politics that associated welfare with black cultural pathology, such as laziness and out of wedlock childbirth (Neubeck and Cazenave 2001).

The Clinton administration also presided over a significant expansion of the carceral state through the passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement

Act of 1994 (Johnson 2017). Although the 1994 crime bill contained some progressive elements, such as a ban on assault weapons, increased funding for women’s shelters, and support for sexual assault prevention education programs, the bill contributed to the expansion of the carceral state in four primary ways. First, the crime bill included a federal “three strikes” provision, which required mandatory life imprisonment without parole for offenders with three or more convictions (Eisen and Chettiar 2016). Second, the crime bill provided $8.7 billion in incentives for states to build prisons and increase sentences through “truth in sentencing” laws which required people convicted of violent crimes to serve at least 85 percent of their sentences (Farley 2016). Third, it increased

18 powers of state surveillance through the expansion of sex offender registries, leading to a sixtyfold increase in the imprisonment of sex offenders from 1996 to 2010 (Gottschalk

2016). Finally, the 1994 crime bill allocated $1.2 billion border control, including enhanced penalties for immigration violations and expedited deportations of immigrants convicted of felonies (Gottschalk 2016).

Another area where the Clinton administration supported neoliberal policies was around trade liberalization. Clinton signed into law the North American Free Trade

Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, eliminating trade barriers between the US, Canada, and

Mexico. NAFTA resulted in substantial job losses in the manufacturing sector and granted substantial power to corporate actors (Steger and Roy 2010). By increasing the mobility of capital, NAFTA has undermined the bargaining power of US workers, allowing employers to close factories and outsource operations in response to disputes over wages and working conditions (Scott 2003). NAFTA also contained a provision known as “Chapter 11” which allows corporations to bypass domestic courts and directly challenge government policies that reduce the value of corporate investments (Steger and

Roy 2010). This mechanism has allowed corporations to bypass environmental protections as threatening the return on their investments, resulting in an increase in oil and gas drilling, pesticide usage, factory farming, and greenhouse gas emissions (Sierra

Club 2014).

The final major area where the Clinton administration pursued neoliberal policy was in the deregulation of the financial sector. In 1999, Clinton signed the Gramm-

Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), which repealed parts of Glass-Stegall, a law introduced in

1933 in response to the Great Depression that separated commercial and investment

19 banking (Steger and Roy 2010). The GLBA removed barriers that prohibited banking, securities, and insurance companies from acting as a combination of an investment bank, a commercial bank, or an insurance company. This allowed investment banks, securities firms, and insurance companies to merge and consolidate into massive financial conglomerates (Kotz 2015). According to Stiglitz (2008), the GLBA led commercial banks to abandon their earlier role as conservative money-management institutions and transform themselves into high-risk ventures. The changes brought about by the passage of the GLBA ultimately contributed to the global financial crisis of 2008, which in turn has contributed to the growing legitimation crisis of neoliberalism (Deménil and Lévy

2013; Mirowski 2014).

Although the Democratic Party had embraced neoliberalism, the Clinton years were a time of general economic growth and relative prosperity (Steger and Roy 2010).

Clinton, for example, not only balanced the budget but left office with a budget surplus.

The economic growth and prosperity of the Clinton presidency seemed to be a vindication of third way politics. However, many of the seeds of the current legitimation crisis were planted during the Clinton years. By embracing a third way politics that prioritized the interests of corporate America over those of ordinary citizens, the Clinton administration set the stage for the populist insurgency against the establishment that came to a head during the 2016 primary campaign (Judis 2016; Müller 2016). This populist backlash is symptomatic of the deeper legitimation crisis of neoliberalism itself.

The Legitimation Crisis of Neoliberalism

According to Habermas (1975), the legitimacy of capitalism is based on the promise that capitalism will produce broad economic prosperity. A legitimation crisis

20 may develop when the system does not meet that promise, which in turn leads to a decline in public support for major US institutions, particularly the state and economy

(Atkinson and Thrope 2015). Legitimation crises have both objective and subjective dimensions. Habermas (1975) referred to the objective dimension as a crisis of system integration, referring to economic downturns produced by the operation of the capitalist system, which in turn produces a crisis of social integration where the public increasingly becomes disillusioned by the unmet promises of the system (Bonanno 2017). The conditions that produce the crisis of system and social integration are illustrated in Figure

Crisis of Legitimation

Crisis of System Crisis of Social Integration Integration

"Anti- Popular Inequality Uncertainty Establishment" Discontent Politics

Figure 2: The Neoliberal Crisis of Legitimation

Crisis of System Integration

According to Habermas (1975), a crisis of system integration occurs when the economic system no longer has effective mechanisms to maintain stability and ensure economic stability. When dominant market mechanisms are unable to address problems

21 associated with capital accumulation, attempts to solve these problems must be carried out through the kinds of state intervention into the economy that proponents of neoliberalism ideologically oppose, therefore creating a contradiction. Bonanno (2017) points to three primary contradictions that are fueling neoliberalism’s crisis of system integration: the rise of economic inequality, economic uncertainty produced by financial crises, and the lack of adequate international governmental regulation of global capital.

Each of these three points will be detailed below.

The first is the contradiction between the neoliberal promise of broad economic prosperity and the reality of growing income and wealth inequality. For example, data from Oxfam indicates that just 42 billionaires currently hold as much wealth as the poorest half of the global population (Elliott 2018). This same report indicated the top 1 percent received 82 percent of the global wealth created in 2017, while the bottom half of the world population saw no increase in wealth. Domestically, the wealthiest one percent of American households owned 40 percent of the nation’s wealth in 2016, which is more wealth than the bottom 90 percent of American households combined (Wolff 2017). One indication of income inequality is the growing divergence between worker productivity and worker compensation. From 1948 to 1973, worker productivity increased by 96.7 percent while worker compensation increased by 91.3 percent (Economic Policy Institute

2017). However, from 1973 to 2016, worker productivity increased by 73.7 percent, while worker compensation only increased by 12.3 percent. In other words, contrary to the predictions of neoliberal policy makers, increased productivity has not led to a

“trickle down” in higher wages for workers. In addition to stagnating wages, the cost of living has continued to rise as well. A report by Erickson (2014) found that the median

22 income for all families declined by eight percent from 2000 to 2012, while the price of rent, health care, child care, and higher education has risen during this same period. This has created what Davies (2014) has referred to as the “middle class squeeze.” Bonanno

(2017) attributes this to a number of factors, including the prioritization of the growth of corporate wealth over the salaries of workers, the lowering of top income tax rates, the dismantling of the social safety net, and cuts to investments on national infrastructure, all of which facilitate a massive increase in the gap between the rich and poor.

According to Bonanno (2017), the growth of economic inequality creates a crisis of system integration for neoliberalism, as market mechanisms have proven incapable of curtailing the gap between the rich and the poor. Neoliberals have attempted to resolve this problem, but with little success. They have also argued that supply side economics will unleash higher levels of economic growth that will trickle down to those not in the upper class. However, attempts to implement supply side economics, such as by

President Reagan in the 1980’s, have not alleviated inequality and indeed have only served to exacerbate the problem (Krugman 1994). An ideological commitment to market competition has prevented neoliberals from being able to adequately respond to the problem of economic inequality (Davies 2014). Reducing economic inequality would require large scale state intervention in the forms of higher tax rates, wage increases, and expansions of the social safety net – all measures that run counter to the core tenets of neoliberal ideology.

The second dimension of the crisis of system integration is the economic uncertainty produced by financial crises (Bonanno 2017). Under welfare state capitalism, the state played an essential role in regulating the economy to prevent recessions and

23 other undesirable outcomes produced by the operation of capitalism (Crouch 2011). This was primarily achieved in three ways. First, the state helped produce peaceful relations between organized labor and big business through enforcing a “labor management accord,” which resulted in high worker productivity and compensation (Bonanno

2017:25). Second, the state used Keyenesian monetary policy to ensure economic stability, reduce unemployment, and maintain a balance between supply and demand

(Bonanno 2017). Under neoliberalism, economic stability and certainty has been thrown into question. Many scholars have identified the main cause of economic uncertainty under neoliberalism as the 2007-08 global financial crisis, which was the longest lasting and most severe recession since the Great Depression (Mirowski 2014). It is beyond the scope of this project to detail the precise causes behind the global financial crisis, but it is important here to note a few of the contributing factors. One obvious contributor was the

GLBA signed into law by President Clinton in 1999, which removed restrictions on commercial bank ownership of investment banks, leading to a frenzy of corporate mergers and the creation of new “too-big-to-fail” financial conglomerates (Steger and

Roy 2010). Another factor involved the practice of subprime mortgage lending, which involves banks offering unstable high interest loans to borrowers with low credit scores.

The government turned a blind eye to this practice, in part out of allegiance to what Reed

Jr. and Chowkwanyun (2012:168) refer to as a “hegemonic commitment to home ownership,” produced by the American Dream.

In response to the global financial crisis, the US government spent more than

$700 billion to bail out mortgage securities from the banks, and nearly a trillion dollars on two economic stimulus packages (Mirowski 2014). The Obama administration passed

24 comprehensive new regulations on the financial sector in the form of the Dodd-Frank

Act, which, among other things, created a consumer financial protection bureau to oversee the lending practices of Wall Street. At the same time, however, the Dodd-Frank

Act did not break up large financial conglomerates and attempts to reintroduce Glass-

Steagall’s restrictions on commercial and investment bank ownership failed (Morgenson

2010). Though, the Obama administration’s interventions helped stabilize the economy, those very acts confirmed the need for governmental regulations. Moreover, those interventions they did not shield the financial sector from future downturns. In fact, such responses to the global financial crisis evidenced again that neoliberalist approaches are incapable of resolving the underlying instability of market forces. Government bail outs of the financial sector displayed a contradiction of one of the core tenets of neoliberalism: the self-correcting nature of markets.

The third dimension of the crisis of system integration involves the lack of effective regulations over the global flow of capital (Bonanno 2017). The hypermobility of capital under neoliberal globalization has led to the emergence of a global capitalist class whose interests are transnational in nature, in that they do not align with any single nation-state (Chomsky 1999; Klein 2007). At the same time, this new global capitalist class depends on a global supply of labor, resulting in the emergence of a transnational working class. However, neither nation-states nor global intergovernmental organizations such as the WTO have the instruments necessary to regulate and monitor the transnational flows of capital that define neoliberal globalization. Given these conditions,

Bonanno (2017:149) argues that neoliberal global capitalism can only be regulated by the emergence of a new form of the state, a “transnational state.” The lack of transnational

25 oversight of global capital flows exacerbates the system crisis, producing global instability and economic uncertainty.

We have seen, then, that economic inequality, uncertainty produced by financial crashes, and the lack of oversight on the global flow of capital has produced a crisis of system integration for neoliberalism. This is what Habermas (1975) referred to as the

“objective dimension” of a legitimation crisis. In the section that follows, I turn to an exploration of the subjective dimensions of the legitimation crisis, known as the crisis of social integration.

Crisis of Social Integration

The neoliberal crisis of system integration is accompanied by a crisis of social integration. According to Habermas (1975), a crisis of social integration entails a lack of public motivation in support of the ideals, norms, and practices that define the major institutions of society. This is seen as an indication of a decline in mass loyalty to the overall system. The crisis of social integration represents a major problem of will formation under neoliberalism. That is, neoliberals are increasingly having a difficult time of convincing the public to accept the legitimacy of the system due to the contradiction between the promise of economic growth and prosperity, and the reality of inequality and uncertainty (Deménil and Lévy 2013).

There are a number of indicators that can be used to demonstrate the crisis of social integration. One indicator is the rise in mortality rates among middle aged white males due to drug overdoses, suicide, and alcohol related liver failure, known as “deaths from despair” (Case and Deaton 2017). Researchers indicate that these deaths are the result of “cumulative disadvantages” in the labor market, such as decline in union

26 membership, disappearance of the manufacturing sector, and the limited availability of decent paying blue collar jobs (Case and Deaton 2017:429). The result is that many middle-aged white men, especially those without a college degree, find themselves worse off financially than their parents.

Another significant indicator of the crisis of social integration is the rise in public distrust in major institutions. This can be seen from opinion polls of the US electorate that demonstrate widespread distrust in official political leaders and mainstream political parties (Rehmann 2016). For example, one study found that while 73 percent of

Americans said they trust the government in 1958, only 18 percent of Americans currently say the same (Pew Research Center 2017). Another recent poll found that

Americans have limited confidence in other major institutions throughout society, including banks, big business, the presidency, both political parties, and the media

(Halpin et al. 2018).

Many scholars have pointed to the rise of anti-establishment candidates within both major political parties in 2016 as evidence of the crisis of social integration

(Rehmenn 2016; Bonanno 2017; Parmar 2017). One study, for example, found that voting for Trump or Sanders was strongly correlated with distrust in the political establishment (Dyck et al. 2018). Others have sought to contextualize the anti- establishment campaigns of Sanders and Trump within the framework of populism, which seeks to pit “the people” against “the elites” (Judis 2016; Müller 2016). During the

2016 election, Trump was viewed as a right-wing authoritarian populist, who defined

“the people” in racialized terms, pitting white Americans against the liberal elites and their multiculturalism which is viewed as a threat to white people’s social status (Parmar

27 2017). The Sanders campaign, by comparison, has been characterized as “left-wing populist” in that it attempted to unite “the people” (defined as “the 99 percent,” not in racialized terms) against the top 1 percent, which is viewed as a political and economic oligarchy (Judis 2016; Parmar 2017).

The rise of populism on the left and right suggests that the structural contradictions of neoliberal economic policies are producing widespread discontent, which has damaged the legitimacy of the system. However, I should issue a cautionary note that the crisis of social integration is still in the early stages and has not yet reached the point where we are witnessing mass resistance against neoliberalism itself (Bonanno

2017). Instead, what we have seen is the growth in widespread distrust in virtually all the major institutions across society. A crisis of social integration does not inevitably translate into widespread public identification of neoliberalism as the source of the problem, especially given the popularity of right-wing discourses that redirect the public’s discontent away from neoliberalism and onto racialized minority groups, as was

Trump’s electoral strategy (Parmar 2017). However, Rehmann (2016) points out that the crisis of social integration represents an opportunity for the left to transform public discourse by shifting the boundaries of common sense to the left.

Resistance to Neoliberalism

If neoliberal capitalism is facing a crisis of legitimacy, then why haven’t resistance movements been successful at channeling public discontent into collective political action to abolish the neoliberalism system? Thus far, the crisis of legitimation has not altered the economic and ideological domination of neoliberalism, especially among policy elites (Mirowski 2014). Despite widespread public discontent, support for

28 neoliberalism remains strong among global policy makers and economic elites (Parmar

2017). Why is this the case? Bonanno (2017) argues that neoliberalism has been able to maintain its dominance due to the various ways in which neoliberals have transformed and co-opted resistance movements through a process that he refers to as the

“neoliberalization of resistance.” A number of other scholars have argued along the same lines that there has been a significant transformation in the strategies, ideologies, and organizational characteristics of resistance movements that has occurred during the transformation from welfare state capitalism to neoliberalism (Mirowski 2014; Dudzic and Reed Jr. 2015; Bonanno 2017; Fraser 2017).

Resistance movements under welfare state capitalism were based on “social places of opposition,” or spatial locations of socio-political aggregation where actors could collectively pursue oppositional struggle (Bonanno 2017:211). These social places of opposition included schools, neighborhoods, workplaces, and other geographic locations where communities of people were spatially concentrated. As a result, resistance was expressed through participation in membership-based organizations, such as civic groups and labor unions (Hardnack 2015). This style of activism has changed under neoliberalism for a number of key reasons. Perhaps most significantly, labor unions have undergone a drastic decline in membership and political power since the 1980’s

(Farben et al. 2018). For instance, data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that union membership has steadily declined from 20.1 percent in 1983 to 11.1 percent in

2015 (Dunn and Walker 2016). This is why Dudzic and Reed Jr. (2015:373), for example, have argued that “neoliberalism is best summarized as capitalism that has effectively eliminated working-class opposition.” As a result, resistance has shifted to

29 loosely connected informal organizations that emphasize individual action over collective action (Lichterman 2009). Individual activism is often expressed through consumption in the market (Bonanno 2017). Under neoliberalism, supporting a political cause is often expressed with purchasing a product or supporting a brand, which channels resistance into a process that increases corporate profit (Crouch 2013).

A related phenomenon to the neoliberalization of resistance is the increased corporate takeover of nonprofit organizations. Corporations and wealthy donors play an outsized role in providing the funding and financial support nonprofit organizations today

(Bonanno 2017). For instance, research by Jenkins (2015) has shown that Wall Street executives, hedge fund managers, and investment bankers make up a disproportionate share of the leadership positions in nonprofit boardrooms. Eikenberry and Klover (2004) argue that this has led many nonprofits to adopt a neoliberal governmentality, including the increased use of market-based approaches, such as fee-for-services and social entrepreneurship. Fee-for-service programs require users of a nonprofit organization’s services to pay a fee, either as a voluntary donation or through membership dues. Social entrepreneurship, on the other hand, refers to nonprofit organizations applying commercial strategies from the private sector to maximize the social impact of its programs and services (Law 2018). As a result of these business-friendly practices, we have seen a fusing of nonprofit organizations with the corporate world.

The scholarship indicates that the left has taken two primary orientations to address the realities of neoliberalism. The first approach is progressive neoliberalism, which attempts to harmonize the left’s goal of social emancipation with the goals of corporate America (Fraser 2017). The second orientation is democratic socialism, a

30 doctrine which supports measures to combat wealth inequality, expand social services, impose new oversight on the financial sector, and reduce the influence of wealth on the political process (Meyer 2018).

Progressive Neoliberalism

According to Reed Jr. (2015), progressive neoliberalism emerged as many on the left began to see market forces as unassailable, and therefore sought a way to pursue left goals of social emancipation within the parameters of the neoliberal order. In particular, advocates of progressive neoliberalism seek to align movements that advocate for the liberation of marginalized groups, such as women and people of color, with powerful sectors of the business world, such as finance, high tech, and the media (Fraser 2017).

Bonanno (2017:213) defines progressive neoliberalism as the “odd alliance” of

“movements that stress identity and the right to be different with Wall Street, the Silicon

Valley, and Hollywood.” As a result, progressive neoliberalism equates social emancipation with the rise of a small elite of talented women and people of color to positions of power within the corporate hierarchy (Fraser 2017). As such, progressive neoliberals do not challenge economic inequality and see it as inevitable. One example of this is Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg, whose book, “Lean In,” advises women to move up in the workplace by focusing on personal development, self-esteem building exercises, and individual initiative, rather than through the pursuit of collective action against systemic inequality (Rottenberg 2013). Thus, under progressive neoliberalism, support for meritocracy and equal opportunity have displaced critiques of systemic inequality.

31 While the most full-throated adoption of government sanctioned progressive neoliberalism was the third way politics of Bill Clinton and Tony Blaire in the 1990’s

(Fraser 2017). the foundations of progressive neoliberalism can be traced back to the works of Milton Friedman and other early architects of neoliberal economic theory.

Central to their ideas was that the free-market was the most efficient tool for ending discrimination on the bases of race, gender, and other socially marginalized identities

(Michaels 2006). According to Friedman’s classic economic text, Capitalism and

Freedom ([1965] 2002), discrimination on the basis of “irrelevant characteristics” such as race or gender is an obstacle to the proper functioning of the market, preventing talented individuals from marginalized groups from freely competing in the economic system.

Therefore, the expansion of the free market would eliminate discrimination and ensure that economic outcomes are the result of individual merit rather than discrimination based on group membership (Bonanno 2017).

The idea that anti-discrimination is not only consistent with, but actually beneficial to, the functioning of the market economy has found its

“public” expression in activist causes shaped by progressive neoliberalism (Reed 2015;

Fraser 2017). This is consistent with Michaels’ (2006) observation that the ideal society under neoliberalism would be one in which the top 1 percent of the population controlled

90 percent of the world’s wealth, but within that top 1 percent there was an equal representation of women, people of color, and other marginalized groups. Under this ideal neoliberal society, discrimination would be eliminated and all social identity groups would have the equal opportunity to compete in the free market system. As a result, any

32 economic inequality that persisted in the absence of identity-based discrimination could be legitimated as the product of meritocracy (Bonanno 2017).

Democratic Socialism

The second major ideological orientation that the left has taken in response to neoliberalism is that of democratic socialism. Although democratic socialists do not call for the immediate abolition of capitalism, they do offer a political platform that challenges the core features of neoliberalism. Democratic socialists challenge the core logic of neoliberalism in five ways. First, they draw public attention to the extreme levels of income and wealth inequality that have accumulated over the past four decades

(Heywood 2012). One primary example of this was the Occupy Wall Street movement, which politicized the disproportionate share of wealth held by the top 1 percent of income earners compared to the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution (Bonanno 2017).

Second, democratic socialists advocate the expansion of the welfare state through universal social programs, such as tuition-free college and single-payer health care

(Meyer 2018). Universal social programs undermine the market-driven ethos of neoliberalism by taking certain goods and services out of the marketplace to provide them to all Americans as basic rights rather than as profitable commodities (Heywood

2012). Third, democratic socialists advocate for new federal oversights on the financial sector to regulate economic cycles and prevent the consolidation of financial conglomerates (Uetricht 2017). Finally, democratic socialists challenge neoliberalism by advocating for an end to the influence of big money over the political process (Jones

2001).

33 Importantly, democratic socialism differs from Marxian forms of socialism in at least two respects. First, democratic socialists embrace electoral politics, rejecting the traditional Marxist embrace of revolutionary working class struggle to seize the means of production (Heywood 2012). Second, democratic socialists primarily focus on expanding the welfare state to ameliorate living conditions under capitalism and use Keynesian state interventionism to prevent financial crises, rather than pursuing the Marxist goal of replacing capitalism with a classless society (Jones 2001). In a similar vein, Chomsky

(2016) noted that Bernie Sanders is not truly a socialist or a radical, but a rather a

“mainstream New Deal Democrat.” Sanders himself has more or less acknowledged this point, stating in a recent interview:

What democratic socialism means to me is building on what Franklin Delano Roosevelt said when he fought for guaranteed economic rights for all Americans. And it means building on what Martin Luther King Jr said in 1968 when he stated: “This country has socialism for the rich, and rugged individualism for the poor.” It builds on the success of many other countries around the world that have done a far better job than we have in protecting the needs of their working families, the elderly, the children, the sick, and the poor. Democratic socialism means that we must create an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy (Sunkara 2018:14).

However, other scholars have argued that democratic socialism is connected to the left’s long term project of transcending capitalism. Chibber (2017) has argued that democratic socialism and Marxian socialism both share the core observation that the business elites are at the center of power under capitalism, and that the strategy to change this requires organizing ordinary working people against capital. For this reason, Chibber places democratic socialism in the broader socialist tradition. Rehmann (2016:7) argues that democratic socialism is the starting point of building a “leftist counter-hegemony” against neoliberalism by shifting the public discourse to the left. Rehmann (2016) goes on

34 to argue that democratic socialism can help construct a broad new historic bloc based on a class alliance of the 99 percent against the top 1 percent, which is conducive to socialist struggle. Lenchner (2015:66) pursues a similar argument, maintaining that democratic socialism has the potential to change the political landscape for both the Democratic

Party and the country as a whole by “remapping the left-wing of the possible.” These debates over the impact of democratic socialism will be returned to below in a discussion of the outcome of the 2016 election.

Party Elites and the Presidential Nomination Process

Presidential elections have been a central feature of the US political process since the founding of the republic (Rackaway 2011). Enshrined in the popular imagination as a symbol of representative democracy, presidential elections give the US political system an aurora of democratic accountability (Moffitt 2011). In reality, however, political and economic elites are able to use various formal and informal mechanisms to maintain control over the electoral process (Marcetic 2016). One of the primary means by which elites maintain control is through the presidential nomination process. While the US

Constitution established a system for electing the president – the electoral college – it did not specify a method for nominating presidential candidates (Levy and McDonald 2018).

As a result, control over the presidential nomination process fell to political parties. This produced a presidential nomination process that contained an inherent tension between party leaders and the will of the people. In order to balance the tension between elite control and popular will, various nomination systems have been implemented during different points in US history.

History of Presidential Nominations

35 Historians typically divide the history of the US presidential nomination process into three separate stages: King Caucus, the convention system, and the modern system

(Kamarck 2015). The earliest nomination system is known as “King Caucus,” due to the dominance of party bosses and backroom deal-making at caucuses (Bartels 1988). Under the King Caucus system, there was little, if any, pretense of democratic accountability.

Presidential nominations were essentially a private intra-party affair where campaigns to secure the nomination involved behind-the-scenes bargaining with party officials at local caucuses and state conventions (Kamarck 2015). Primaries contested through the popular vote were not part of the nomination process at this stage, as decision-making mostly occurred in backrooms between party officials (Denton and Kuypers 2007).

By the dawn of the twentieth century, the undemocratic nature of the King Caucus system led to cries for reform, which resulted in a number of changes to the nomination process. These changes resulted in a new presidential nomination system that historians refer to as the convention system (Levy and McDonald 2018). It was during this period that primary campaigns were introduced and became an important part of the nomination process (Denton and Kuypers 2007). However, party officials still maintained control over the selection of convention delegates, who were often paid political operatives, so the goal of a candidate’s campaign was not to win over the public so much as to curry favor with party bosses who could corral the support of delegates (Marcetic 2016).

Primaries, then, were far less significant than the behind-the-scenes negotiation process with the party officials. Primary campaigns did, however, serve a symbolic purpose.

Candidates often used victories in primaries to display their electability to party bosses

(Kamarck 2015). So, while primaries were important, the ultimate decision came down to

36 the party officials, not the voters (Bartels 1988). Indeed, when push came to shove, party officials often had no problem overturning the will of the voters to nominate their preferred candidate.

One of the most salient examples of this was the 1968 Democratic Party presidential nomination (Passchier 2016). This election occurred at the height of anti-

Vietnam War sentiment, which ultimately led incumbent president Lyndon B. Johnson to announce that he would not be seeking re-election. Party leadership wanted to give the nomination to vice president Hubert Humphrey, who was popular with most Democratic congress-members, mayors, and governors. However, an insurgent campaign by senator

Eugene McCarthy tapped into a powerful anti-war constituency, leading him to win more votes than any other candidate in the primary (Marcetic 2016). This was still not enough to secure McCarthy the nomination. During the highly contentious 1968 Democratic

National Convention, the party leadership gave the nomination to Humphrey, despite the fact that he did not even bother to run in the primary (Kamarck 2015). This caused an uproar from the anti-war wing of the party, who saw it as proof that the election was rigged by the party establishment against a popular anti-war candidate (Tichenor and

Fuerstman 2008).

The resulting backlash over the 1968 Democratic nomination led the Democratic

Party to make significant reforms to their nomination process, which ultimately led to creation of what historians refer to as the modern system of presidential nominations

(Kamarck 2015). In the aftermath of the disastrous 1968 Democratic National

Convention, a group of party officials known as the McGovern-Fraser Commission came together to implement major reforms to the nomination process (Passchier 2016). The

37 commission’s goal was to shift the balance of power from party leaders to rank and file voters by mandating that all delegates be chosen in public forums open to all party members. As a result, the number of primaries more than double from 17 in 1968 to 35 in

1980 (Levy and McDonald 2018). The number of voters who participated in primaries also dramatically increased. While only 13 million Americans voted in the 1968 nomination, 32 million did in 1980 (Marcetic 2016). The national convention became mostly symbolic, as the leading candidate would already have secured enough delegates through primary victories to secure the nomination before the national convention.

By 1980, however, Democratic Party insiders began to conclude that the

McGovern-Fraser reforms had been a failure (Marcetic 2016). The party had suffered two major electoral defeats since the implementation of the new nomination system. In 1972,

George McGovern suffered a 49-state defeat to Richard Nixon, and in 1980, Jimmy

Carter lost to Ronald Reagan in a landslide. This prompted party leaders to rethink their democratization over the nomination process (Kamarck 2015). The result was the appointment of a new committee, known as the Hunt Commission, to tilt the balance of power back to the party establishment. The Hunt Commission accomplished this by introducing what came to be known as “superdelegates” (Marcetic 2016). These unpledged delegates were made up of party insiders who would be free to vote for the candidate of their choice at the national convention (Levy and McDonald 2018). Thus, party insiders reinstated their ability to overturn the will of the voters if they deemed that to be necessary.

The Modern Presidential Nomination System

38 Two of the core features of the modern presidential nomination process is the importance in media coverage due to the rise of “candidate-centered campaigns” and the centrality of fundraising to the campaign process (Tichenor and Fuerstman 2008:69).

Mass media did not play a large role in presidential nomination campaigns before the modern era, as nomination campaigns during King Caucus and the convention system mostly took place behind-the-scenes (Denton and Kuypers 2007). Today, presidential primaries have become a mass media spectacle. Presidential nomination campaigns fuel the 24-hour news cycle, with widespread coverage over candidates, campaign strategy, delegate counts, polling numbers, and debates (Winston 2013). News coverage has become essential for presidential nomination campaigns, as the media is the gatekeeper over access to mass communication with the public. Coverage in the media becomes a way for a candidate to gain name recognition and for their message to be heard by a wide audience of potential voters (Fridkin and Kenney 2005). Thus, media strategy is an essential component of modern presidential campaigns.

The rise in importance of the news media to modern presidential campaigns coincided with another significant development: neoliberal deregulation of the telecommunications industry, which led to the corporate consolidation of media ownership (Zinn 2005). While there had been more than 50 media companies in the early

1980’s, by 2012 just six corporations controlled 90 percent of the media (Lutz 2012).

Previous research has found that the corporate owned, for-profit nature of the media creates an institutional bias in favor of news coverage that aligns with business interests

(Herman and Chomsky [1988] 2002). This has enormous consequences for presidential elections, as the media’s institutional bias creates an obstacle for outsider candidates who

39 seek to challenge corporate power and propose alternatives to neoliberalism (Rehmann

2016).

The second core feature of modern presidential nominations is the centrality of money to the election process. The cost of running for office has steadily been increasing for decades, so that today presidential candidates generally need to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to compete for their party’s nomination (Levy and McDonald 2018).

For example, while the 1992 presidential election cost $300 million (adjusted for inflation), Trump and Clinton spent a combined $2.65 billion on the 2016 election (Berr

2016). Between 2000 and 2016, the amount spent by the winning candidate’s campaign nearly quadrupled (Denton and Kuypers 2007). For example, during the 2016 election, just 20 individual donors gave more than $500 million during that election cycle, while the top 20 corporate donors also gave $500 million (Biersack 2018).

The influence of money on politics has also been strengthened by the creation of so-called “Super PAC’s,” which can raise unlimited sums of money from individual and corporate donations (Thurber 2013). Another factor at play is the infamous Citizens

United ruling. In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that political spending from corporations and other organizations constituted a form of protected speech (Garrett 2013). Although

Citizens United does not allow corporations to contribute directly to candidates, the ruling prohibits the government from restricting “independent expenditures” that seek to persuade the voting public, such as advertisements. The Supreme Court maintained that because these funds were not being spent in coordination with a campaign, they do not

“give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption” (Biersack 2018). However, the ruling has contributed to an increase in the influence of unrestricted spending from large

40 organizations such as Super PAC’s over the campaign process. During the 2016 election, for instance, the top 20 organizational donors contributed more than $500 million to the presidential election (Biersack 2018). The Citizens United ruling, then, has served to crystalize the central role money plays in modern presidential campaigns.

There are two main reasons that the centrality of money to the modern campaign process tilts power in favor of wealthy donors over ordinary citizens. First, it is often easier and more efficient for candidates to pursue a strategy that prioritizes raising a large sum of money from a few wealthy donors rather than chase after small amounts of money from a large number of donors (Denton and Kuypers 2007). This creates an incentive for candidates to seek out a small number of wealthy mega donors for campaign contributions. Second, wealthy donors typically expect something in return for their contributions, which pushes candidates to refrain from taking positions on issues that would offend their wealthy donors. In practice, this leads to presidential candidates offering policy proposals that do not threaten the interests of the business class (Chibber

2017). On the other hand, it is sometimes possible for candidates to run successful fundraising campaigns without relying on a strategy of cultivating wealthy donors. One of the ways that this can occur is when a presidential candidate is independently wealthy and can self-finance much of their campaign, reducing their reliance on big donors (Judis

2016). Some presidential candidates also seek out small donations from ordinary voters as part of a populist strategy of portraying themselves as being on the side of the people and not the elites (Müller 2016).

To summarize, modern presidential campaigns have shifted towards a focus on mass media coverage and fund raising. The modern nomination process is a neoliberal

41 nomination process, as presidential candidates are reconfigured as marketable brands to be commodified through the mass media (Uetricht 2017). In other words, we have seen a neoliberalization of the electoral system in the United States. This would have enormous consequences for 2016 election, where insurgent candidate Bernie Sanders made challenging the corporate control over the election process a central component of his campaign.

2016 Democratic Party Primary Campaign

A central theme to emerge from the scholarly literature is that the 2016

Democratic Party primary constituted a major divide between the party establishment and the insurgent left populist Sanders campaign. Dyck, Pearson-Merckowitz, and Coates

(2018:352) have described the Clinton campaign as a “quasi-incumbent candidacy.” That is, a candidate who campaigns as if they were an incumbent, even though they do not hold the office that is being contested (Passchier 2016). Examples of the Clinton campaign’s quasi-incumbent status abound. For example, even before officially announcing her candidacy, Clinton had long been presumed to be the frontrunner for the

Democratic nomination by much of the media (Uetricht 2017). Clinton had entered the

2016 race with much of her campaign infrastructure intact from her previous presidential bid in 2008 (Chibber 2017). She also had the support of most party leaders, elected officials, and members of the press (Lechner 2015). Clinton situated her presidential campaign as a continuation of the legacy of previous Democratic administrations (Bock,

Byrd-Graven, and Burkley 2017). She emphasized her considerable political experience as senator and secretary of state as proof of her ability to “get things done” in Washington

(Chibber 2017). Despite her early anointing as frontrunner, Clinton faced relentless

42 negative press coverage that was often biased, sensationalistic, and scandal-driven

(Patterson 2016). Many have noted the gendered double-standards that were present for press coverage of the Clinton campaigns in both the 2008 and 2016 elections (Carlin and

Winfrey 2009; Wilz 2016; Bock et al. 2017).

The Sanders campaign has been characterized in the literature as an “intra-party insurgency” (Dyck et al. 2018). According to Passchier (2016), an intra-party insurgency can be defined as a campaign inside a major political party that aims to transform the political process by engaging ordinary citizens and raising new issues ignored by the party establishment. Intra-party insurgencies attempt to champion reform on behalf of those disenchanted with the party establishment (Tichenor and Fuerstman 2008). One example of this is Sanders’ call for a “political revolution,” which can be seen as an attempt to channel citizen frustration with the goal of transforming the political process and the party system (Chibber 2017).

Party establishments can rely on a number of mechanisms to prevent intra-party insurgent candidates from successfully securing the presidential nomination. One method is for the party leadership to simply tilt the scales in favor of the establishment candidate.

This can be seen in the DNC emails leaked by WikiLeaks that reveal private conversations between DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and other

Democratic Party officials. In these emails, Schultz and the other DNC officials ridicule and dismiss Sanders, such as calling his campaign “a mess,” and stating bluntly that

Sanders “isn’t going to be president” (Shear and Rosenberg 2016).

Another common strategy used by party establishments to stifle intra-party insurgencies is to simply co-opt ideas from the insurgent candidate and incorporate them

43 into the establishment candidate’s platform (Passchier 2016). This allows the establishment candidate to shift their positions to become more attractive to voters who backed the insurgency candidate (Rapaport and Stone 2008). Looking at the history of intra-party insurgent campaigns in the twentieth century, Tichenor and Fuerstman

(2008:69) have argued that such insurgent campaigns typically result in procedural reforms but “fell far short of their popular democratic aspirations” for systemic transformation of the political process.

Another way that the Democratic Party establishment maintains control over the nomination process is through the use of superdelegates. These 714 superdelegates are free to support any candidate of their choosing, regardless of the will of the voters

(Marcetic 2016). In the 2016 election, more than 70 percent of the superdelegates pledged their support for Clinton before the campaign even began (Rehmann 2016).

Whenever the media would report delegate counts for Sanders and Clinton, they would include superdelegates in the total, which created the skewed impression of an inevitable

Clinton victory (Marcetic 2016).

Scholars have noted that the corporate news media also plays a role in stifling insurgent campaigns (Passchier 2016; Chibber 2017). The media typical give less air time to insurgent candidates than to establishment candidates (Uetricht 2017). This was certainly true for the Sanders campaign. For example, a study by Patterson (2016) found that Sanders received less press coverage in 2015 than the five leading Republican candidates (Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Ben Carson), and that

Clinton herself received three times more coverage than Sanders did. The same report by

Patterson (2016) notes that the lack of media coverage Sanders received during the early

44 months of the campaign limited his ability to make inroads on the Clinton campaign’s early lead.

Why does the news media tend to cover established candidates over insurgent candidates? This can be explained by a number of factors. One is simply that there is an ideological congruence between pundits and thought leaders in the mass media and the establishment political party leadership (Marcetic 2016). As discussed above, the consolidation of corporate media ownership means that journalists often have a professional bias in favor of corporate interests over ordinary citizens (Herman and

Chomsky [1988] 2002). Another issue is that there is often behind-the-scenes coordination between the party leadership and members of the press in order to secure favorable coverage for the establishment candidate. In one example that occurred during the 2016 primary, the Clinton campaign coordinated with liberal columnists and pundits to discuss strategies and develop talking points to use against the Sanders campaign

(Vladimirov 2016). It was also revealed that CNN commentator Donna Brazile had secretly leaked debate questions to the Clinton campaign during the primaries (Quigley

2017). These instances of behind-the-scenes coordination between the Clinton campaign and the press illustrate the interconnected nature of party establishments and the corporate news media, which combined to create an obstacle for the insurgent Sanders campaign.

Conclusion

My goal in this chapter was to locate the 2016 primary campaign in the context of neoliberalism and its ongoing crisis of legitimation. To that end, I provided a broad overview of the concept of neoliberalism by identifying its major sociopolitical

45 developments, its impact on culture, and its major policy prescriptions. Next, I explored the objective and subjective processes that are driving neoliberalism’s crisis of legitimation. This crisis played itself out in the 2016 election with the rise of populist insurgency campaigns railing against party establishments. To understand the role party elites played in determining the outcome of the 2016 election, I offered a brief history of the presidential nomination process, focusing on the role party insiders had in dominating the process over the party’s rank-and-file members. The modern nomination system emphasizes candidate-centered campaigns primary elections played out with in the mass media that require large sums of money. While such campaigns may appear to be democratic, in reality the process favors the corporate news media and wealthy donors.

Largely shut out from media coverage and the largess of wealthy donors, the Sanders campaign acted as an intra-party insurgency aimed at channeling voter frustration at the establishment by raising new issues and calling for a major transformation of the political system.

46 THEORETICAL BACKGROUND AND RESEARCH METHODS

In this chapter, I turn to a discussion of the theoretical background and research methods that have informed this study. I begin by offering a brief overview of frame analysis, then turn to a discussion of two specific concepts within frame analysis that are most relevant to my project: issue frames and collective action frames. I will discuss the implications of bringing these concepts together to design a content analysis study of campaign speeches from the 2016 Democratic Party primaries.

Next I will turn to a detailed examination of my research methods. In this section,

I will lay out the steps I have taken to collect and analyze the data for my project. First, I list the research questions that inform my project. Then, I lay out the design of the study, with an explanation of the rationale for conducting a mixed-method content analysis.

This will be followed by a discussion of the sampling procedures used for data collection.

Finally, I will discuss two empirical measures I have constructed to aid in the data analysis process: issue salience and issue orientation. Finally, I will issue a cautionary note related to the limitations of my project’s research design.

Theoretical Background

This research project, while not explicitly theoretical in nature, has been influenced by a number of particular theoretical traditions within the field of sociology. It is for this reason that I will use the term “theoretical background” throughout this chapter, rather than “theory.” This is to indicate that my purpose is not to test a sociological theory or to construct a comparative analysis of two or more competing theories. Instead, this is an empirical research project that is influenced by two theoretical traditions within frame analysis. In the section below, I will offer a brief outline of the

47 frame analysis approach. Then, I will explore the two applications of frame analysis that are pertinent to my research project: issue frames and collective action frames.

Frame Analysis

The concept of framing has been used in a diverse array of fields including linguistics, communications, media studies, philosophy, and cognitive science, but the sociological use of frame analysis is primarily rooted in the symbolic-interactionist paradigm (Hardnack 2015). The work of W.I. Thomas (2002) in the early twentieth century explored the ways in which actors modify their social behavior in accordance to a

“definition of the situation.” Erving Goffman (1974) seized upon this idea and expanded it into the concept of frame analysis. Frames, according to Goffman (1974), are interpretive schemas that help individuals make sense of everyday reality by organizing and structuring experience into a coherent pattern of meaning. These patterns of meaning become so routine that they acquire a taken-for-granted character, occurring below the level of conscious awareness (Carroll 2005; Chambliss 2005). Frames are analogous to mental categories individuals use to make sense of the world, and as a result, framing shapes individuals’ goals, plans, actions, and judgments of good or bad outcomes (Lakoff

1996). Goffman (1974) points out, however, that ordinary people do not typically create the frames that govern their everyday experiences, but instead rely on frames that are derived from the broader culture and social structure.

Issue Framing

The issue framing perspective builds on the symbolic-interactionist concept of frame but takes it out of the realm of everyday life and focuses instead on the political arena (Damore 2004). According to this perspective, politics can be characterized as an

48 ongoing struggle to define the nature of social problems and to offer public policy solutions to those problems (Denton and Kuypers 2007). According to Knoepfel et al.

(2007), issue framing involves the communicative process of transforming a social problem into a public policy issue. At any given time, there can be a myriad of problems that people encounter in their everyday lives as public citizens, but these problems do not automatically become “objects of political controversy” unless there is a process of issue framing involved (Knoepfel et al 2007:129). The issue framing process involves politicians and social movement leaders competing to define the nature of a social problem in order to orient the public’s understanding of a given problem and to point to specific policy solutions (Lachapelle, Montpetit, and Gauvin 2014).

In electoral campaigns, rival candidates compete over issue framing to control the campaign narrative and agenda. This allows a candidate to control the terms of the debate and to monopolize how a given issue is covered by the media and framed in the minds of the public (Boydstun, Glazier, and Pietryka 2013). One of the primary ways that candidates engage in issue framing is through campaign speeches. Presidential nomination contests typically involve a candidate traveling the country to deliver a series of speeches to audiences of potential voters in key target cities. Candidates typically develop a series of speech modules that result in a stock speech that can be repeated, with slight variations. By repeating the same issue framing in speeches night after night, candidates increase their chances of having their preferred issue framing recognized by and resonate with voters, the mass media, and ultimately become part of the broader public discourse. However, candidates also change their framing of the issues throughout campaigns in response to events that happen during the campaign or in order to best tailor

49 their speech to a particular audience. Candidates may also change the way they frame issues in response to a rival candidate’s framing. This may occur when a rival candidate’s framing catches on in the media and begins to resonate with voters, or when a rival unexpectedly brings up a new issue to emphasize. During intra-party insurgency campaigns, where the framing of issues is highly contested, establishment candidates have two choices: they can either entrench their positions and stick to the party’s established framing, or they can attempt to re-frame their positions and move closer to the insurgent candidate’s framing in order to win over supporters of the insurgent candidate.

Issue framing played an important role in the 2016 Democratic Party primaries.

As the de facto frontrunner, the Clinton campaign was initially seen as something of a continuation of Obama’s policies. However, the unexpected popularity of Sanders’ democratic-socialist platform forced Clinton to engage in a vigorous debate with Sanders and the left-wing of the party over major policies such as healthcare, education, and Wall

Street reform.

Many observers noted that the Sanders campaign pushed Clinton to take a more progressive orientation on the issues. However, there have not yet been any empirical studies that have attempted to analyze the specific dynamics of issue framing as they occurred over the course of the 2016 primary campaign. The present study aims to fill this gap in the literature by analyzing the issue framing used by Sanders and Clinton during the 2016 Democratic Party primaries, looking at three specific issues: healthcare, education, and Wall Street reform. These three issues were chosen for their relevance to the debates between neoliberalism and democratic socialism, as shall be explained in

50 more detail in the methods section below. In order to establish a measure of the candidates’ orientation towards these three issues, I draw from the literature on collective action framing, which I shall discuss below.

Collective Action Frames

The study of collective action frames is part of a larger body of literature on social movements inspired by the frame analysis perspective. Collective action frames are a particular type of framing device that are used by social movement leaders to mobilize constituents around the goals of a social movement (Snow et al. 1986). There are some similarities between collective action frames and issue frames, but also a few important differences. These differences are primarily rooted in the distinct nature of social movements and political campaigns. Political campaigns are formal, time-bound events driven by candidates and parties competing for public office. Social movements, in contrast, are not time-bound and are typically informal groupings of individuals and organizations focused on bringing about social change regarding a specific issue (Hutter et al. 2018). Scholars have suggested that political campaigns and social movements can sometimes play complimentary roles, particularly during the intra-party insurgencies, through what is known as the insider/outsider strategy. According to this strategy, intra- party insurgents work to change the party from the inside, while social movements work from the outside to push political parties to pay attention to their demands and policy prescriptions.

Additional comparisons between the two types of framing can be drawn. Issue framing during political campaigns is oriented towards offering public policy solutions to a social problem. Collective action frames can be oriented towards public policy, but they

51 can also serve broader goals of social and cultural change outside the political arena.

However, the commonality between issue frames and collective action frames is that both seek to define the nature of a given problem and offer a solution to that problem. These two dimensions of framing – identifying a problem and articulating a solution – are what

Benford and Snow (2000:615) refer to as “core framing tasks.” In the first “task,” the process of identifying the causes of a given social problem and assigning blame to those responsible is known as diagnostic framing. Proposing solutions to address the social problem, the second “task,” is referred to as prognostic framing. Taken together, diagnostic and prognostic framing are key to building collective action frames.

Benford and Snow’s (2000) concept of diagnostic and prognostic framing provides a useful tool to examine the 2016 Democratic Party primary campaign.

Focusing on how the candidates assigned blame and proposed solutions to the major campaign issues can provide a window into Clinton and Sanders’ views of neoliberalism and its ongoing legitimation crisis. In doing so, I will borrow Benford and Snow’s (2000) diagnostic and prognostic framing concept from the social movements literature and apply it to the 2016 Democratic Party primary to analyze how the candidates framed the issues in relation to two competing political orientations: neoliberalism and democratic- socialism. This will involve blending together the theoretical traditions of issue framing and collective action framing to explore three major issues that were prominently featured and highly contested in the 2016 election: healthcare, education, and Wall Street reform. I will provide a more detailed explanation as to why I have chosen these three issues, and how I relate them to neoliberalism and democratic-socialism below. I will

52 now turn to a discussion of the methods used in this research project, my data collection procedure, and my analysis process.

Research Methods

Research Questions

Based on the insights gleaned from the literature, the following four primary research questions inform my empirical study:

RQ1: How salient were the issues of healthcare, education, and Wall Street

reform to the Clinton and Sanders campaigns?

RQ2: Did the salience of these issues change over the course of the campaign?

RQ3: How did Clinton and Sanders frame these issues in relation to the political

orientations of neoliberalism and democratic socialism?

RQ4: Did the framing of these issues change over the course of the campaign in

the direction of neoliberalism or democratic-socialism?

In order to answer these research questions, I have conducted a mixed-methods content analysis of campaign speeches from the 2016 Democratic Party primaries, blending elements of qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze the framing processes used by Clinton and Sanders around healthcare, education, and Wall Street reform policy. In the next section, I will detail how I designed my study and collected and analyzed the data.

Study Design

Researchers have defined content analysis as a set of systemic techniques for the objective study of the characteristics of messages (Riffe, Lacy, and Zico 2014). As

Bertrand and Hughes (2005: 198) argue, “content analysis consists in taking a sample of

53 media, establishing categories of content, measuring the presence of each category within the sample, and interpreting the results, usually against some external criteria.” Whereas quantitative content analysis involves assigning numeric values to units of content for the purpose of statistical measurement, qualitative analysis uses an emergent and interpretative process to ascertain meaning from content. According to Altheide and

Schneider (2013:5), qualitative content analysis involves the use of “integrated and conceptually informed methods, procedures, and techniques for locating, identifying, retrieving, and analyzing documents for their relevance, significance, and meaning.” In the case of this study, the documents analyzed for content will be transcripts of campaign speeches delivered by Clinton and Sanders during the 2016 Democratic Party primaries.

In order to tighten the focus on this project, I began by selecting the policy issues that I would analyze. I began by reading through speech transcripts and watching

YouTube videos of speeches delivered by Clinton and Sanders. This allowed me to immerse myself in the data and explore the issues Clinton and Sanders brought up in a

“typical” speech. As I watched the speeches, I made a list of all the topics that the candidates mentioned. This list covered a broad range of topics, including foreign policy, international trade, the death penalty, and gun control. Although all of these issues are relevant to the discussion of neoliberalism and democratic-socialism, I wanted to select issues that were both significant topics of debate throughout the entire campaign, and of significant importance to the national discussion. Some issues, such as gun control for example, came up periodically throughout the campaign, but were not a core feature in every speech. I selected three issues where the candidates had substantial differences so that a comparison of their framing processes would be more meaningful: healthcare,

54 education, and Wall Street reform. The relevance of these three issues was amplified also due to their connection to deregulation and privatization which are core aspects of neoliberalism. However, I must offer a note of caution that the selection of these three issues, as opposed to the myriad of other topics debated during the primary, can perhaps bias my results. I will discuss this and other limitations in the next chapter.

After selecting the three policy issues, I then turned to the process of collecting data. Because the unit of analysis in this study is campaign speeches, I began to seek out ways to obtain speech transcripts. This proved difficult, as candidates did not publish official copies of their speech transcripts and do not list the schedule of their speaking tours on their websites. As a result, I was not able to obtain a complete list of every speech delivered by Clinton and Sanders throughout the campaign. Instead, I had to turn to media transcripts.

Many of the speeches delivered by Clinton and Sanders during the campaign were subject to coverage in local and national media. This was particularly true of significant speeches, such as the campaign launch speech, or speeches where candidates laid out their plans for a new policy initiative. To obtain transcripts, I used the American

Presidency Project, a database maintained by the University of California at Santa

Barbara which contains speech transcripts for American presidential elections and party primaries. My original plan was to obtain weekly transcripts for each candidate for the entire course of their campaigns. However, the American Presidency Project only had a limited number of speeches, so I sought to find additional sources. This led me to

CSPAN.org, which broadcast campaign speeches periodically throughout the primaries and offers transcripts for download on its website. Even with these two databases

55 combined, I still fell short of a complete list of every speech given by the candidates.

However, by combining these two sources, I was able to obtain 47 transcripts for Clinton and 49 transcripts for Sanders, for a total of 96 speeches. Unfortunately, I was unable to determine what percentage of the total number of speeches these 96 represented, as the

Clinton and Sanders campaigns did not make a complete list of speeches publically available.

I then took a sample of these 96 speeches to arrive at 25 speeches per candidate, for a total of 50 speeches. I utilized purposive and convenience sampling for this process.

First, I eliminated speeches that were at town hall meetings. These speeches are more of a

“back and forth” discussion with members of the audience, which could lead the candidate to significantly deviate from their standard stump speech. This meant that these town hall discussions were less likely to represent the candidates’ typical stump speech.

Second, I eliminated any speeches that were “single-issue” focused. These were typically speeches that were delivered in front of a special interest group or occurred in response to a major event. For example, Hillary Clinton delivered a speech focused exclusively on foreign policy after an ISIS attack had occurred. This kind of speech, while clearly important, would not be helpful in building a dataset that allowed for comparisons over time. With these caveats, I selected a sample by arranging all 96 total speeches in chronological order. Then, I sampled speeches by starting at the campaign launch speech and picked one speech every two weeks until the Democratic National Convention. When

I was unable to obtain a transcript of a speech every two weeks, I tried to choose a speech that was the closest to the two-week mark regardless of how many weeks it may have been. This was due to the limitations in the availability of speech transcripts. Using this

56 process, I arrived at a total of 25 speeches per candidate, for a total sample of 50 speeches.

Data Analysis Procedure

The primary tool I used to analyze the data was a content analysis software known as AntConc. This open-source software was created by Lawrence Anthony and is used to conduct concordance analyses on text documents. AntConc’s concordance analysis searches through a set of documents for a keyword, and then displays the context in which the word appears in the text. This tool allowed me to identify all of the places in each speech where Sanders and Clinton mentioned the three policy issues and gave me a context as to where and how the issue appeared in the overall speech. Thus, I was able to use AntConc to ascertain frequency counts and to help identify the relevant portions of the speeches to use for my qualitative analysis of the candidate’s orientation on the issues.

Before running my analysis in AntConc, I first had to clean the dataset. This involved going through each speech transcript and proof-reading it for any obvious spelling errors. I also attempted to make sure that the spelling of words was consistent.

After cleaning the data, I uploaded all the transcripts into .txt files and labeled them by date so that they would appear in chronological order. Finally, I loaded the .txt files into

AntConc and separated them into two directories: one for Clinton and one for Sanders.

That allowed me to analyze candidate frequency count separately.

The data analysis process involved measurement of two constructs: issue salience and issue orientation. First, I used AntConc to analyze issue salience, which I measured based on frequency count. I used the keyword search function in AntConc to determine

57 how many times each policy issue was mentioned by the two candidates. In order to cast a wide net, I ran additional searches for common variations of phrases. For education, I searched for the following terms, “education,” “college,” “universities,” “tuition,” and

“schools.” For health care, I searched for, “health care,” “health insurance,” “medical care,” and “medical insurance.” And for Wall Street, I searched for, “Wall Street,”

“banks,” “bankers,” “banking,” “financial industry,” “financial institutions,” “financial crisis,” “financial crash,” and “Great Recession.” By searching for different variations of terms, I was able to reduce the possibility of missing any issue mentions.

I then broke down issue salience into two dimensions: campaign total and individual speeches. To measure the first dimension, I looked at the total frequency count of issue mentions across all 25 speeches. This was the total number of times the candidate discussed each of the three issues throughout their 25 speeches of the campaign. This measure is taken as an indicator of how important each of these three issues were to the candidates’ campaign as a whole. The second dimension looks at how that importance changed over time. In order to do this, I analyzed the frequency that each issue was mentioned per speech. This allowed me to provide a descriptive analysis of changes in the frequency of issue mentions throughout the campaign.

In order to measure how issue salience changed from speech to speech, I had to first arrange the candidates’ speeches onto a timeline. Unfortunately, the convenience sampling techniques I used to build my dataset prevented me from matching Clinton and

Sanders speeches on the same date. Therefore, the dates of the speeches do not perfectly align. To address this, I constructed a timeline that went across a 15-month period from

May 2015 to July 2016, covering the campaign launch to the nomination. This allowed

58 me to present monthly issue frequency totals based on the candidates’ without tying them to specific dates. However, this entailed a second problem. Again, due to the convenience sampling techniques employed in this study, I was unable to obtain an equal number of speech transcripts for each month. To resolve this problem, I constructed a timeline using the average score for each month. So, for example, if a candidate had two speeches in the same month in my sample, then I took the average frequency count of these two speeches for that month. This allowed me to construct a timeline that explored how issue salience changed from speech to speech.

Next, I measured issue orientation through a combination of qualitative and quantitative content analysis of the diagnostic and prognostic frames used by Clinton and

Sanders. To do this, I first constructed a research protocol. Following Altheide and

Schneider (2013), I devised a list of questions, items, and analytic categories to guide my analysis of the data and organized them into a research protocol. See the Appendix for a copy of my research protocol.

After having designed a protocol to guide my qualitative analysis, I then used

AntConc’s concordance tool to search out all the places in each speech that the candidate mentioned the three issues that I am analyzing. I then analyzed each speech according to my research protocol. My primary focus was on exploring diagnostic and prognostic framing relating to the three issues. To measure diagnostic framing, I looked to see who the candidate assigned blame for the problem. This also involves the use of valence terms when assigning blame as an indication that the candidate was attributing strong negative emotions towards the persons or groups deemed responsible. In addition to attribution of blame, I also used diagnostic framing to explore how candidates defined the nature of the

59 social problem. In other words, I looked at the reasoning candidates used to explain why the issue is a problem worthy of policy attention. In particular, I was interested in exploring whether or not candidates used framing that situated the issues in the context of the unequal class structure in the United States (suggesting a democratic-socialist orientation), or whether the candidate defined the issue as primarily the result of personal incompetence, Republican maleficence, or some technocratic procedural problem

(suggesting a neo-liberal orientation).

In order to analyze prognostic framing, I explored the solutions that candidates offered to resolve the policy issues they had diagnosed. A prognosis that was coded as democratic socialist in orientation was one that proposed major challenges to corporate power and class inequality, or that offered to significantly expand the social safety net by decommodifying major industries and treating them as public goods. Neoliberal prognostic framing called for market-driven social programs that combine private sector incentives with the use of means-testing to apportion benefits.

After I determined the diagnostic and prognostic frames used by the candidate, I assigned each a score using a 5-point issue orientation scale for each speech. The categories for this scale are as follows:

1: Strongly Neoliberal

2: Partially Neoliberal

3: Mixed / Moderate

4: Partially Democratic Socialist

5: Strongly Democratic Socialist

60 I coded the data beginning with a mixed score of 3 for each speech. Then, I subtracted one point for a neoliberal diagnostic framing and then subtracted another point for a neoliberal prognostic framing. Conversely, I would add one point on the scale each for the presence of democratic socialist prognostic and diagnostic framing. For example, if the candidate used both a diagnostic and prognostic neoliberal framing of health care, then they would be assigned a score of 1 for “fully neoliberal” for their health care orientation in that speech. In addition, I coded data that was missing or incomplete as a

“0.” This score was assigned in cases where the candidate either did not mention the issue in their speech, or they mentioned it only in passing and did not provide any diagnostic or prognostic frames to discuss it. For the purposes of descriptive analysis, I also calculated the average issue orientation score for the beginning, middle, and end of the campaign.

This allowed me to capture how the candidates’ framing changed over time. In order to avoid artificially deflating the orientation scores, I did not include the speeches that were scored “0” when calculating the average.

The purpose of assigning a numeric value to the candidate’s issue orientation is to observe any changes in the candidates’ framing over time. By assigning a numeric value,

I can observe any trends in the direction that the candidates moved between neoliberal and democratic socialist positions. This also better allowed me to see how candidate’s framing changed from speech to speech throughout the campaign, and to see how their positions changed relative to one another.

I offer one final note of caution regarding the issue orientation scale. This scale is not intended to be an externally valid instrument to be used for empirical hypothesis testing, but rather as a heuristic device to provide insight into the framing processes used

61 by the two candidates. The issue orientation measurement is nonetheless an invaluable construct for this study, as it provides a descriptive and numerical analysis of how the candidates changed their positions relative to neoliberalism and democratic socialism over the course of the campaign.

62 FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

I begin this chapter with a presentation of the results of my content analysis.

Combining elements of qualitative and quantitative analysis, each of the three issue areas will be discussed regarding their salience and orientation for both candidates. I close the chapter by relating my findings to my research questions and to their implications of future studies.

Issue Salience

400

350

300

250

200 Hillary Clinton

Frequency Bernie Sanders 150

100

0 Education Health Care Wall Street Issue

Figure 3: Total Issue Salience Scores Figure 3 combines the findings regarding issue salience across these three issues.

As can be seen here, Sanders discussed all three issues more frequently than Clinton. This indicates that these issues were more salient to the Sanders campaign than to Clinton’s. A second pattern revealed by the data is that the issue the candidates discussed most frequently was education. Clinton mentioned education 262 times across 25 speeches, while Sanders discussed it 363 times. In comparison, Clinton discussed health care 116

63 times and Wall Street 77 times throughout the campaign, while Sanders discussed health care and Wall Street 179 and 222 times respectively. This indicates that education was the most salient issue overall.

A final significant finding that emerged from this frequency count was that the issue with the greatest distance between the two candidates was Wall Street, with a 145- point difference between the two candidates’ saliency scores. Out of the three issues analyzed for this study, Wall Street was the one that Clinton discussed the least. The difference between Clinton’s most frequently discussed issue (education) and her least frequently discussed (Wall Street) reveals a gap of 185 points. This is an indication that

Clinton perhaps underemphasized Wall Street in relation to the other issues.

Next, I turn to the question of how the salience of education, health care, and Wall

Street varied across the campaign speeches. My findings indicate that mentions of the issues fluctuated throughout the campaign. Many factors potentially explain this variation. One explanation could be the length of speeches, with longer ones giving the candidate more opportunity to mention a certain issue. Additionally, candidates might highlight some issues more than others depending on what city they are giving the speech in or the group to which they are speaking. Candidates may also highlight different issues depending on major events happening in the news cycle at the time. It is also possible that a candidate might increase their focus on an issue in response to challenges from their opponent’s campaign. These factors may have led to a fluctuation in the number of times a candidate discusses an issue in each speech. Unfortunately, my research was not able to determine causality behind changes in issue saliency. Instead, it attempts to describe the changes that did occur across the speeches in my sample. In the sections that

64 follow, I provide a descriptive analysis of how issue salience changed across the campaign for education, health care, and Wall Street.

Education Salience

Hillary Clinton 15 Bernie Sanders Average Frequency Average 10

0 Mar-15 Jul-15 Oct-15 Jan-16 Apr-16 Aug-16 Date (Mo-Yr)

Figure 4: Education Salience by Date Figure 4 illustrates a 15-month timeline of the candidates’ average monthly frequency counts regarding education from May 2015 to July 2016. During May 2015, the first month of the campaign, Clinton mentioned education more than Sanders did (14 to 9). Over the next month, Sanders’ average frequency count rose to 26. In July 2015,

Clinton’s average issue salience score fell to 6.5 and then began to rise over the next few months, peaking at 17 in September 2015. During this same period, issue salience fell for

Sanders to a low point of 1 issue mention in September 2015. For the rest of the campaign, Clinton’s average issue salience score gradually began to fall, reaching a low point of 5 in February 2016. During this same time, the Sanders campaign’s score had

65 risen to 15. Clinton’s average education issue salience score rose to 18 by May 2016 and then fell to seven in June and ended at nine in July. At the same time, Sanders’ average education issue salience score dropped slightly and then rose to a high point of 31 in June

2016, before declining to nine in July – the exact same number as Clinton.

These findings reveal some important patterns in the ebb and flow of the issue salience score. For example, there are three periods in the timeline where Sanders was increasing his average issue salience scores while Clinton’s scores were either remaining static or declining. This can be seen from May to August 2015, from November 2015 to

February 2016, and finally from May to June 2016. From June to July 2016, Sanders’ average score fell 22 points, from 31 in June to nine in July. Sanders’ average education salience score during the final month of the campaign was the same average score as the

Clinton campaign. It is possible that Sanders was heavily emphasizing education in June

2016 as a last final push of the campaign, and then once it became clear in July that

Clinton would win the nomination, Sanders began to emphasize this area less often.

Health Care Salience

Health-care became a central issue of the Democratic Party primary campaign for a number of reasons. First, Democratic candidates were in some ways reacting to the

Republican Party presidential candidates who had promised to repeal the Affordable Care

Act (ACA), popularly known as “Obamacare.” The Republican attack on the ACA compelled the Democratic candidates to respond with their own health care plan. Second, the ACA was a central achievement of the Obama administration, compelling any

Democrat who was running as a continuation of Obama’s legacy to defend the law. This was crucial for Clinton, who sought to defend and expand the ACA. Finally, Sanders

66 made universal health care a central plank of his policy platform from the very beginning of his campaign. For these reasons, health care was one of the key issues of the 2016

Democratic Party primary.

Clinton’s total health care salience score was 116, compared to 179 for Sanders.

In addition, Sanders mentioned universal health care far more frequently than Clinton, with Sanders discussing it 73 times throughout the campaign while Clinton only mentioned universal health care eight times. However, it is important to note that Clinton mentioned the ACA more frequently than Sanders did, with Clinton discussing the ACA

35 times during the campaign compared to 23 times for Sanders.

Hillary Clinton 8 Bernie Sanders

Average Frequency Average 6

0 Apr-15 Jul-15 Oct-15 Jan-16 May-16 Aug-16 Date (Mo-Yr)

Figure 5: Health Care Salience by Date Figure 5 illustrates changes in Clinton and Sanders’ average health care salience score, arranged monthly from May 2015 to July 2016. During the first month of the campaign, Clinton mentioned health care an average of six times per speech while

67 Sanders mentioned it nine. Then, over the next few months, Clinton’s score remained stable before declining to two in August 2015. From that point, her average health care salience scores continued to increase until November 2015, where it reached an average of 11 mentions. For the rest of the campaign, Clinton’s average health care salience score followed a pattern of decline punctuated by periods of stability until the end of the campaign, where she had a final average score of three. For his part, Sanders’ average health care salience score peaked at 16 in June 2015 and then began a period of decline until reaching a low point of one on October 2015. After this time, Sanders’ average salience score began to rise to up to 11 in January 2016. For the rest of the campaign,

Sanders’ average salience score fluctuated until ending at eight points in July 2016. In comparison, Clinton’s final average score was three.

During the period of September to December 2015, Clinton mentioned health care more on average than Sanders did. After this point, Clinton’s average health care salience scores declined while Sanders rose. The fluctuations between Clinton and Sanders here suggest that perhaps the campaigns were responding to one another during this time. It is also important to note that during the final month of the campaign, Sanders continued to discuss health care more frequently than Clinton did. This stands in contrast to the pattern observed for education salience above, where the two candidates’ salience scores aligned during the final month of the campaign. This might suggest perhaps that Sanders wished to continue emphasizing health care to push Clinton to remain focused on the issue.

It is also important to explore the specific salience of universal health care over the course of the campaign. For the first several months of the campaign, Clinton did not mention universal health care in any of her speeches. By comparison, Sanders mentioned

68 universal health care six times in his initial speech and continued to mention the issue consistently during the next several months. Then, on January 21, 2016, Sanders mentioned universal health care 11 times, the highest point of his campaign. On January

26, 2016, Clinton then mentioned universal health care for the first time of her campaign, discussing the topic three times. This indicates that Clinton’s discussion of universal health care was, at least in part, a reaction to Sanders’ focus on the issue.

Throughout the rest of the campaign, Clinton mentioned universal health care only five more times. Sanders, however, continued to discuss universal health care throughout the campaign, but did so less frequently than before. By his final speech,

Sanders had only mentioned universal health care twice (Clinton mentioned it once during her final speech). This finding indicates that Sanders pushed Clinton to discuss universal health care, but that as Sanders saw his campaign coming to an end, he began to mention the topic with less frequency, bringing Sanders’ frequency count closer to

Clinton’s.

Wall Street Salience

Figure 6 illustrates the average monthly Wall Street salience scores throughout the campaign. The first month of the campaign saw Clinton mentioning Wall Street an average of four times per speech, compared to six for Sanders. Clinton began offering more detailed discussions of her economic policy in her speeches starting July 2015. In this month, she mentioned Wall Street an average of eight times per speech, the highest for her campaign. For the rest of the campaign, Clinton discussed Wall Street less frequently than Sanders. After reaching a low point of two in July 2015, the Sanders campaign had higher average Wall Street salience scores than Clinton did. In February

69 2016, Sanders’ average Wall Street salience score peaked at 22. Sanders’ average score remained high right up until the last month of the campaign. From June to July 2016,

Sanders’ average Wall Street salience score dropped from 13 to two. Clinton’s final score in July 2016 was four.

Hillary Clinton 10 Bernie Sanders Average Frequency Average

0 Apr-15 Jul-15 Oct-15 Jan-16 May-16 Aug-16 Date (Mo-Yr)

Figure 6: Wall Street Salience by Date These findings indicate perhaps that the despite an initial surge at the beginning of the campaign, Clinton placed less emphasis on Wall Street compared to Sanders for most of the campaign. This could indicate that Sanders was able to establish ownership over the issue of Wall Street, which led Clinton to discuss the topic less frequently. It is also important to note that in February 2016, Sanders began to focus relentlessly on Wall

Street. He also focused heavily on Wall Street in May and June of 2016. However, in

July Clinton had a higher average Wall Street salience score than Sanders did, at four and two respectively. It is possible that Sanders saw Wall Street as a divisive issue that was

70 fracturing Democratic voters, and therefore sought to downplay this topic during the final month of the campaign as he began preparing to endorse Clinton for the nomination.

Issue Orientation

The candidates’ issue orientation towards education, health care, and Wall Street were determined using qualitative and quantitative methods. In the section that follows, I will offer an interpretative analysis of the diagnostic and prognostic framing devices used to discuss the three issues. This analysis includes a 5-point issue orientation scale that illustrates the candidates’ ideological positions and their changes over the campaign. This issue orientation scale will combine both diagnostic and prognostic framing to arrive at a composite score for each candidate. For analytical purposes, I will also be discussing changes in issue orientation over time by dividing the campaign into three distinct phases.

The first phase begins with the campaign launch and lasts for the first several months as the candidates refine their message. The second phase of the campaign began roughly around late-November 2015 and ended around June 2016. During this long middle phase, the candidates began to reframe their positions partly in response to criticism from their rival. The final phase of the campaign began during July 2016. This phase sees the candidates again reframing their positions to find a compromise between the two campaigns. The average score on the issue orientation scale will be reported for each phase of the campaign.

Education Orientation

The candidates’ orientation towards education policy was measured by exploring diagnostic and prognostic framing devices in relation to neoliberalism and democratic socialism. Figure 7 illustrates the results of this analysis over the course of the campaign,

71 with candidates’ education orientation arranged on a 5-point scale ranging from 1

“strongly neoliberal” to 5 “strongly democratic socialist.”

The first phase of the campaign lasted from May to November 2015 and included eight speeches for each candidate. During this period, Clinton’s average education orientation score was 1.25, indicating a position close to “strongly neoliberal.” During

3 Hillary Clinton Bernie Sanders

Education Orientation Scale Orientation Education 2

1 Apr-15 Jul-15 Oct-15 Jan-16 May-16 Aug-16 Date (Mo-Yr)

Figure 7: Education Orientation by Date this phase, Sanders’ average score was 3.9, closest to the “partially democratic socialist” position. These average scores reflect both diagnostic and prognostic framing.

Throughout this phase of the campaign, Clinton’s framing fluctuated between strongly and partially neoliberal, while Sanders’ framing remained mostly at partially social democratic and occasionally changed to strongly democratic socialist.

During this period, Clinton and Sanders used somewhat similar diagnostic frames but different prognostic frames. For example, Clinton relied on two primary diagnostic

72 frames to discuss education: competitiveness and affordability. In regard to the former,

Clinton argued that an educated workforce is necessary for America to remain competitive in a global economy. Clinton described education, jobs skills training, and technological innovation as essential to “building the economy of tomorrow, not yesterday” (May18, 2015). Clinton also framed education as a matter of affordability, for instance, describing student loan debt as a “burden” and a “barrier” to student achievement (August 28, 2015). Additionally, the debt, Clinton argued, is preventing future generations from having access to a middle-class life by preventing graduates from moving out of their parents’ house, getting married, or starting a business. One of her oft- repeated lines during this phase of her campaign was that, “paying for college shouldn’t be the hardest thing about going to college” (August 28, 2015).

Much like Clinton, Sanders diagnosed the problem of education as being a matter of competition and affordability. In his campaign launch speech on May 26, 2015,

Sanders stated that,

In a highly competitive global economy, we need the best educated workforce we can create. it is insane and counterproductive to the best interests of our country that hundreds of the thousands of bright young people cannot afford to go to college, and that millions of others leave school with a mountain of debt that burdens them for decades. That must end.

Sanders continued to touch on the theme of competitiveness and affordability throughout the first phase of the campaign. However, Sanders added an additional diagnostic frame that Clinton did not. Sanders located the problem of education within his central observation that the economic system is “rigged” in favor of millionaires and billionaires over ordinary people. He did this by contrasting the lack of affordable college with the greed and excess of Wall Street. Sanders also connected college affordability to

73 youth unemployment, particularly in black and Latino communities. In an August 9, 2015 speech, Sanders argued that children growing up poor were forced to limit their career aspirations and restrict their life chances because they were raised to believe they would never be able to go to college. Sanders also described the “rigged economy” as harming

America’s global competitiveness by prioritizing spending on incarceration over an educated workforce. Clinton’s diagnostic framing of education during the first phase of the campaign can be seen as neoliberal, in that she characterized the problem of education through the lenses of global competitiveness and affordability without connecting this to corporate greed and economic inequality. Sanders, on the other hand, utilized the same neoliberal diagnostic frames as Clinton, but he connected them to his campaign’s larger theme of income inequality.

Turning to prognostic framing, Clinton and Sanders both offered different proposals to address problems in the education system. Clinton’s primary prognostic framing during this first phase was to focus on making education more affordable without taking it out of the marketplace. On June 13, 2015, Clinton argued for making college education “as debt-free as possible.” She also offered support for Obama’s plan to make community college tuition-free. In this sense, then, Clinton’s prognostic framing of education was from a neoliberal perspective during this period.

A contrast can be seen in Sanders’ statements regarding education. In his campaign launch speech, Sanders endorsed “college for all” and called for making all public colleges and universities tuition-free. In a July 25, 2015 speech, Sanders went even further, calling higher education a “right, not a privilege.” In a speech on August 9, 2015,

Sanders discussed the need to “revolutionize education in America” by making it free for

74 all people regardless of their family’s income. Sanders’ prognosis of making public colleges and universities tuition-free addressed his diagnostic frames of competitiveness and affordability. However, to provide a solution to the problem of the “rigged economy” in relation to education, Sanders proposed a tax on Wall Street speculation to pay for tuition-free college and to reduce the burden of student debt. On September 19, 2015,

Sanders argued that, “the middle-class of this country bailed out Wall Street, now it is time for Wall Street to help the middle-class of this country.” Sanders’ prognosis for education is democratic socialist in that he is arguing for taking public colleges and universities out of the logic of the marketplace and treating them as public goods to be paid for primarily by taxes on Wall Street.

The second phase of the campaign lasted from November 2015 to June 2016, during which time the candidates began to address their opponent’s positions and started reframing their own. During this phase, Clinton’s average composite education orientation score was 1.3, indicating a strongly neoliberal position. During the second phase of the campaign, Sanders average score increased slightly to 4.1, indicating a partially democratic socialist position. These average orientation scores are based on a combination of diagnostic and prognostic framing. In terms of diagnostic framing,

Sanders and Clinton continued to use most of the same frames as they did during first phase of the campaign: Clinton discussed competitiveness and affordability, while

Sanders touched on those same topics along with a central focus on the rigged economy.

With minor variation, the diagnostic frames used by Clinton and Sanders remained relatively unchanged.

75 Clinton and Sanders did begin to introduce new prognostic frames during this period. The major change that occurred was that Clinton began to directly challenge

Sanders’ education platform and began to strike a populist tone herself. On November 29,

2015, Clinton defended her support for “affordable college” but not “free college,” on the grounds that free college would benefit the wealthy at the expense of the middle-class and working-class. During this speech, Clinton argued that free college would be tantamount to forcing taxpayers to subsidize the education of “Donald Trump’s kids.”

Instead of free college for all, Clinton stressed her desire to focus on the “middle-class and working-class.” Clinton continued to elaborate on this critique of Sanders’ free college proposal during the second phase of the campaign. On March 22, 2016, directly addressed Sanders’ education proposals,

We are going to make four-year colleges and universities debt-free so that students can afford to attend. I do differ with my esteemed opponent who says, “free for everybody.” I want to concentrate on middle-class families, working families, and poor families. Personally, I think if you can afford to send your child to college, like Donald Trump, we should not pay to send your child for free.

In this passage, Clinton offers a defense of means-tested education policy that would separate out different groups based on income brackets in order to apportion education benefits. Although designed to help students in lower-income brackets, means- testing can be seen as a neoliberal policy, in that it treats higher education as a commodity to be traded on the marketplace, rather than as a public good to be made available to all. However, Clinton’s prognostic framing of education during this period is particularly interesting, in that she defends a neoliberal policy position (means-tested higher education benefits) while using populist language that pits the working and middle-classes against the wealthy.

76 During this phase, Sanders continued to use similar prognostic frames as in the first phase. In contrast to Clinton’s means-tested proposal he advocated for making public colleges and universities tuition-free for all people regardless of income. Although

Clinton used populist language to defend a means-tested prognosis, her proposal still subjected higher education to the logic of the marketplace. Sanders proposal for tuition- free higher education would treat higher education as a decommodified public good that should be made universally available to all citizens. This position can be defined as democratic socialist, compared to the neoliberal position advocated by Clinton. The primary difference between Clinton and Sanders’ prognosis of education is that Clinton views education as a commodity that needs to be made more affordable, whereas Sanders views education as a universal right that should be free for all people.

At the start of the final phase of the campaign, in July 2016, both the Clinton and

Sanders campaign shifted their framing and language as Clinton secured the nomination.

During this phase, the average education orientation score for both candidates was three, indicating that the two campaigns had both moderated their positions in an effort to compromise. The diagnostic framing devices used by Clinton and Sanders during this period, however, remained largely unchanged. Clinton and Sanders continued to stress competitiveness and affordability, with Sanders adding in frames around the rigged economy. Clinton, while not embracing a “rigged economy” framing, continued to strike a populist tone by pitting the working and middle-classes against the wealthy.

The major shift that occurred during the final phase was around prognostic framing. Although Clinton did not explicitly endorse Sanders’ plan for tuition-free public college and universities, she did begin to argue in favor of the continued expansion of

77 means-tested education policy to include ever greater segments of the population. At the beginning of the campaign, she had endorsed free community college. By July 12, 2016,

Clinton had endorsed a plan to make four year universities tuition-free for students with incomes of less than $125,000. In her DNC nomination speech on July 28, Clinton discussed collaborating with Sanders on education policy, noting, “Bernie Sanders and I will work together to make college tuition-free for the middle class and debt free for all.”

During the final phase of the campaign, Sanders also began to shift his prognostic framing to orient himself towards Clinton’s policies. In his speech on July 12, for example, Sanders argued,

Hillary Clinton believes that we must substantially lower student debt and that we must make public colleges and universities tuition-free for middle-class and working families of this country. This is a major initiative that will revolutionize higher education in this country and improve the lives of so many of our people. Think of what it will mean. Think of this, when every child in this country, regardless of the income of his or her family, knows that if they study hard, if they take school seriously, yes, they will be able to get a college education and leave school without debt.

These statements highlight some rather significant changes on Sanders’ part.

Sanders has moved from his initial support for free college for all, regardless of income, to endorsing a means-tested education policy that focuses on the middle and working class income-brackets. Thus, Sanders was now endorsing a policy that treats higher education as a commodity, rather than a public good. Sanders also notes that Clinton’s education plan won’t be tuition-free, but that students can leave school “without debt,” echoing Clinton’s “debt-free” college framing. In the previous phases of the campaign,

Sanders had offered tuition-free higher education as the solution to the affordability crisis, rather than “debt-free.” A debt-free plan would use a combination of subsidies, tax-credits, grants, and scholarships to help reduce the costs of tuition so that students do

78 not have to go into debt. While this does help make higher education more affordable, it does fall short of Sanders’ original proposal for making public colleges and universities tuition free.

In his final speech on July 28, Sanders acknowledged the “different approaches” the two candidates had when it came to education policy. However, Sanders noted that they had “come together” on a proposal that will guarantee that,

Children of any family this country with an annual income of $125,000 a year or less —83 percent of our population — will be able to go to a public college or university tuition free.

Here, then, Sanders and Clinton are coming together to compromise around a means-tested neoliberal program and the aspirations of democratic-socialism for a universal education policy. This was accomplished by Sanders trading his “tuition-free for all” framing for a “debt-free for some” frame that borrowed from the Clinton campaign. While Sanders started out endorsing a free college plan that would apply to

100 percent of the US population, he ended the campaign settling for a plan that would cover only 83 percent. Clinton, on the other hand, continued to expand her definition of

“debt-free” to include new income groups and populations within her education policy.

She ended up endorsing free community college and free college for those with incomes under $125,000, all the while using universalistic language. However, Clinton remained within a neoliberal means-testing policy framework and never went as far as endorsing a plan that offers higher education as a decommodified public good to all people.

Health Care Orientation

79 5

3 Hillary Clinton Bernie Sanders

2 Health Care Orientation Scale Orientation Care Health

1 Apr-15 Jul-15 Oct-15 Jan-16 May-16 Aug-16 Date (Mo-Yr)

Figure 8: Health Care Orientation by Date Figure 8 illustrates the candidates’ health care orientation scores throughout the campaign, ranging from strongly neoliberal (1) to strongly democratic socialist (5). As an be see in Figure 8, Clinton and Sanders took starkly different approaches when framing the issue of health care. During the first phase of the campaign, lasting from May to

October 2015, Clinton and Sanders were mostly on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of framing. Clinton scored an average of 1.1 on the 5-point health care orientation scale during the first phase of the campaign, suggesting a strongly neoliberal framing.

Meanwhile, Sanders had an average orientation score of 4.9, suggesting a strongly democratic socialist approach.

In terms of diagnostic framing, Clinton described health care as “one of the biggest stresses in anybody’s life” and a “huge strain on families” in her campaign launch speech. She went on to argue that the two primary problems with health care are

80 affordability and Republican obstructionism. Republican attempts to repeal the ACA remained one of the primary themes Clinton used throughout the campaign. On

November 29, 2015, Clinton noted that the Republican Party had voted 60 times to repeal or weaken the ACA. For Clinton, then, defending the ACA became one of primary frames of her campaign.

During the first phase of the campaign, Sanders framed health care differently.

Sanders’ diagnostic framing of health care focused primarily on coverage and decommodification. Whereas Clinton emphasized affordability, Sanders’ diagnostic framing noted the reason that US does not currently have universal coverage is that we treat health care a “privilege, not a right.” Much like education, Sanders diagnosed the primary problem with health care as it being treated as a commodity to be bought and sold on the marketplace, rather than as a basic human right to be provided as a public good.

Unlike Clinton, defending the ACA was not a primary focus of Sanders’ health care diagnosis. Sanders did praise the ACA for making “modest gains,” citing the removal of barriers to “pre-existing conditions,” expanding coverage to 17 million people, and pay equity in insurance prices for men and women. However, Sanders criticized the ACA for failing to provide universal coverage. He noted that the ACA still left 29 million American uninsured, and many more under-insured. Therefore, for

Sanders, the ACA made some advancements but did not provide universal coverage or take health care out of the marketplace.

Turning now to prognostic framing, my analysis reveals that the candidates offered different prognoses of health care policy. During the first phase of the campaign,

81 Clinton’s primary prognostic framing for health care was to defend the ACA from

Republican attacks and to gradually strengthen and improve it. “I will fight to protect the

Affordable Care Act and I will work to make the changes that are required,” Clinton said in a May 2015 speech. However, in Clinton’s speeches during this period, she did not go into detail to describe what those changes might look like. Instead, she continued to defend the progress that had been made under the ACA and promised to protect it from

Republican repeal efforts.

During the first phase of the campaign, Sanders offered a consistent prognosis for health care, which can be summarized by a statement made in his May 26, 2015 speech,

“the United States must join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee health care to all as a right by moving toward a Medicare-for-All single payer system.” Sanders’ prognostic framing of health care supported a specific form of universal health care: a single payer system. This system would treat health insurance coverage as a right to be provided to all citizens by the government. Thus, single payer would take health insurance out of the marketplace and offer it as a public good.

During the second phase of the campaign, Clinton and Sanders began to respond to one another and offer criticisms regarding health care policies. During this period,

Clinton had moved to an average health care orientation score of 1.6, while Sanders remained at an average of 4.9. This indicates that Clinton was closest to a partially neoliberal position while Sanders was strongly democratic socialist. During this phase of the campaign, Sanders stuck to roughly the same diagnostic and prognostic framing as he did in the first part of the campaign. Clinton, however, began to respond to Sanders’ positions by clarifying and modifying her own. In terms of diagnostic framing, Clinton

82 continued to make an impassioned case for the importance of defending the ACA. On

November 29, 2015, Clinton vaguely referred to “those who think we should rip up the

ACA” without directly mentioning Sanders. Just like the first phase of the campaign,

Clinton diagnosed the problem of health care as being a matter of defending the ACA and gradually strengthening it. During the second phase, however, Clinton would add that the

ACA needs to be defended not only from the Republicans, but from the Sanders campaign as well. Clinton argued that eliminating the ACA would benefit the insurance companies, who would be able to return to the days of pre-existing conditions. Clinton’s diagnostic framing here also implies that there is a parallel between Sanders and the

Republican’s attack on the ACA, even though their criticisms were very different.

In a speech on February 13, Clinton addressed Sanders’ health care policy directly with a pointed critique. Clinton stated,

My opponent us wants to start all over again. My opponent wants to throw us into a contentious national debate about a theory of health care coverage that would cost an enormous amount in taxes for every single American. It would start us at zero. I think we are better off fixing the Affordable Care Act…. We are better off starting from where we are and building on that — going from 90 percent coverage to 100 percent — than starting at zero and trying to go to 100 percent with a Republican congress. I want us to make progress right now.

In this statement, Clinton directly critiques Sanders’ prognostic framing of health care. She does so in many ways. First, she refers to Sanders’ health care plan as a “theory of health care coverage.” Rather than use terms such as “single payer” or “Medicare for all,” Clinton describes Sanders’ proposal as a “theory,” implying that it is unproven and untested. Secondly, Clinton argues that Sanders’ plan would substantially raise taxes on

“every single American.” And Sanders’ plan would require starting from scratch, which would never pass the Republican congress. Thus, Clinton frames Sanders’ plan as

83 untested, expensive, and impractical. Her plan to go from “90 percent coverage to 100 percent” does not offer any details as to how this will be achieved, what it will cost, and how it will pass the Republican congress.

During the second phase of the campaign, Clinton’s prognostic framing began to shift as she grappled with Sanders’ position. It was during this phase of the campaign that

Clinton first voiced her support for universal health care. In a speech on January 26,

2016, Clinton noted her long history of fighting for universal health coverage,

You know, I believe in universal health care coverage. Every American should have it. You know, before it was called “Obamacare,” it was called, “Hillarycare.” This was back in '93 and '94 when I was trying to get universal health care. But we were not successful, and that was really disappointing.

By adopting the term “universal,” Clinton was making a major shift in her prognostic framing of health care. However, it is important to note that although Clinton began using the term “universal,” she did not endorse single payer or Medicare-for-All.

Instead, she advocated for expanding the ACA until it included covered the entire US population. In this sense, we can see that Clinton shifted towards using democratic socialist language (“universal health care”) in order to defend a neoliberal policy (the

ACA). Despite her use of universalistic language during this phase of the campaign,

Clinton continued to utilize neoliberal prognostic framing that defines health care as a market-driven commodity rather than a public good.

During the final phase of the campaign, Clinton and Sanders’ positions began to shift in terms of their prognostic framing of health care. During this phase, Clinton’s average health care orientation score was two, while Sanders’ was three. This indicated that Clinton ended the campaign with a partially neoliberal framing of health care, while

Sanders ended the campaign with a mixed framing.

84 Although diagnostic framing of health care remained more or less unchanged during this period, a major shift occurred on Sanders’ part in terms of prognostic framing.

This can be seen in Sanders’ speech on July 12, 2016. In this speech, Sanders noted that

Clinton, as First Lady, had “helped lead the fight to universal health care.” He went on to defend several policies from Clinton’s health care platform, stating that,

Hillary Clinton wants to see that all Americans have the right to choose a public option in their health care exchange, which will lower the cost of health care for millions. She also believes that anyone 55 years or older should be able to opt in to Medicare. And she wants to see millions more Americans gain access to primary health care, dental care, mental health counseling and low-cost prescription drugs through a major and dramatic expansion of community health centers throughout this country. We need more people with access to quality health care, not fewer.

In this speech, Sanders offered support for Clinton’s plan to expand health care to certain age groups and segments of the population, even though this fell short of endorsing universal coverage. Sanders’ final sentence noting that we need “more people” with access to health care, “not fewer,” indicates that he has resigned himself to support a plan that fell short of universal coverage. Thus, Sanders at the end of the campaign was no longer advocating for universal coverage and support for health care as a right, but rather was offering support for expanding access to more segments of the population.

During this same period, there were some interesting shifts in the Clinton campaign as well. Clinton offered rhetorical support for universal health care while not endorsing single payer and failed to specify a specific policy agenda beyond a call to

“expand the ACA.” However, Clinton began to shift towards Sanders’ position by offering several concessions, such as a public option, decreasing the Medicare age to 55, and expanding of public health centers nationwide. Clinton’s final speeches indicate that she was willing to move her position to accommodate democratic socialist concerns by

85 using the language of “health care as a right.” Despite this, Clinton ultimately did not endorse single payer health care. Sanders, on the other hand, maintained his commitment to universal coverage but began to offer support for Clinton’s plans that fell short of providing health care as a decommodified public good.

Wall Street Orientation

3 Hillary Clinton Bernie Sanders 2 Wall Street Orientation Scale Orientation Street Wall 1 May-15 Aug-15 Nov-15 Mar-16 Jun-16 Date (Mo-Yr)

Figure 9: Wall Street Orientation by Date Figure 9 illustrates the candidates’ Wall Street orientation score throughout the campaign, ranging from strongly neoliberal (1) to strongly democratic socialist (5).

During the first phase, from May to October 2015, Clinton had an average Wall Street orientation score of 1.1, indicating a strongly neoliberal score. Sanders, on the other hand, had an average score of 4.8 during this period, indicating a strongly democratic socialist stance. This can be seen in an analysis of the diagnostic and prognostic framing devices used during each of the three phases of the campaign.

Clinton and Sanders began the campaign using different diagnostic framing devices to discuss Wall Street policy. Clinton’s diagnostic framing relied on three

86 primary themes: economic hardship, partisan blame, and Wall Street’s short-sightedness.

First, Clinton’s diagnostic framing focused on the hardships the Great Recession imposed on the American people. In her May 18, campaign launch speech, Clinton discussed this economic hardship, noting that, “people have lost jobs. They lost houses. They lost the chance to finish or go on with their education.” Clinton also introduced a diagnostic frame during this period that focused on assigning partisan blame for the financial crisis.

On June 13, 2015, Clinton argued that America’s “basic bargain” of upward mobility was being destroyed by the Republican reckless policies. Clinton would continue throughout the entire campaign to rely on this partisan framing to explain the origins of the financial crisis. According to Clinton, the Republican Party’s “bad economic policies” ruined the economy.

On July 13, 2015, Clinton began to place the blame for the Great Recession on

Wall Street’s behavior, rather than just on the Republican Party’s policies, by calling out the shortsightedness of certain Wall Street investors. She referred to this as “quarterly capitalism,” where bankers focus on short term profit over long term growth and sustainability. In Clinton’s view, pursuit of short term profit led Wall Street to make risky investments, which, when coupled with Republican economic policies, led to the Great

Recession. Clinton also discussed the “criminal behavior” and “misconduct” on Wall

Street. However, she focused primarily on the criminality of individual bankers and firms who have committed acts of fraud. Importantly, Clinton did not, however, claim that

Wall Street as a whole is criminal or a rigged system. In fact, Clinton made sure to praise

Wall Street for its positive impact on American society as a whole,

87 As a former Senator from New York, I know firsthand the role that Wall Street can and should play in our economy, helping main street grow and prosper, and boosting new companies that make America more competitive globally.

During the first phase of the campaign, Sanders struck a different tone. His diagnostic framing focused on characterizing Wall Street’s role as part of the “rigged economy.” Although he acknowledged the Republican Party’s obstructionist role,

Sanders placed the blame for the financial crash squarely on the shoulders of Wall Street itself. Throughout the campaign, Sanders repeatedly used negative valence terms to characterize Wall Street, such as “greedy,” “reckless,” and “thievery.” Sanders’ open hostility towards Wall Street CEO’s can be seen in speech after speech throughout the campaign. He described Wall Street bankers as engaging in criminal activity by

“gambling” on risky financial instruments and expecting the taxpayers to bail them out.

Like Clinton, Sanders also discussed the negative impacts the financial crisis had on

American workers, detailing stories of their economic hardships. However, Sanders did not solely blame the financial crash on the Republican Party, but instead identified the entire financial system itself as bearing the blame.

Turning to prognostic framing, we can see Clinton and Sanders offering different solutions to address the financial industry. Clinton offered two solutions to the problem of the financial crisis. First, she argued that American workers must make sacrifices and work hard to get the economy back on its feet. On June 13, 2015, Clinton noted,

I have been incredibly impressed over the last several years at how hard the American people have worked to pull ourselves out of the Great Recession. People have made a lot of sacrifice.… And they did everything that they could think of to do to get back on their feet. And I'm so relieved that, as I travel around the country and talk with people, there is a sense that we are on our feet. We're not running yet but we are on our feet.

88 The second prognostic frame Clinton offered during this phase of the campaign was that just as the Republican Party’s bad economics created the financial crisis, it was the Democratic Party that fixed it. In speech after speech, Clinton praised President

Obama for his job at cleaning up “the mess that he inherited when he became president in

2009” and promised to defend the reforms that Obama put into place on Wall Street, such as the Dodd-Frank Act. Clinton also promised to “go beyond” the Dodd-Frank Act, but did not specify what new measures she would implement.

Sanders used rather different prognostic frames during this period. As noted in the education section above, Sanders supported imposing a new tax on Wall Street speculation to pay for tuition-free public colleges and universities. Sanders argued that this could serve as a way for Wall Street to repay the taxpayers for bailing them out after the 2007-8 financial crash. A second proposal Sanders advocated was the reinstatement of Glass-Stegall to separate commercial and investment banking. Although the 2016

Democratic Party Platform would go on to officially endorse an “updated ad modernized version of Glass-Steagall,” Clinton herself continued to endorse Dodd-Frank and did not mention Glass-Steagall in any of the speeches in my sample. Sanders, however, argued that the Dodd-Frank act, while important, was not sufficient to stop Wall Street greed from putting the economy at risk for working people. For this reason, Sanders advocated for breaking apart the major Wall Street financial institutions. In contrast to Clinton’s claim that “too big to fail is still too big of a problem,” Sanders went a step further and argued, “if a bank is too big to fail, that bank is too big to exist. Break it up!” It is important to note, however, that Sanders’ proposal here was rather vague and not clearly defined. Sanders did not, for instance, specify a criterion to determine when a bank had

89 become “too big to fail.” And unlike his prognoses for education and health care, which advocated the decommodification of major public goods, Sanders did not call for nationalizing big banks or the financial system.

Turning now to the second phase of the campaign, we can see that Clinton had an average Wall Street orientation score of 1.3, while Sanders had an average score of 4.7.

During this phase, Clinton continued to use the same diagnostic framing devices as before, focusing on the hardships faced by ordinary Americans, the bad economic policies of the Republican Party, and the shortsightedness of Wall Street that caused the financial crash. Sanders, during the second phase of the campaign, likewise continued to push the same diagnostic frames as before, pitting Wall Street against the working people. This framing drew a connection between Wall Street greed and the socioeconomic problems the American people are experiencing. For Sanders, working people and Wall Street are locked into an antagonistic relationship where Wall Street’s ill-gotten gains have come at the expense of the public. Sanders elaborated on this point in a speech on January 21, 2016,

Over the last 30 years, Goldman Sachs has operated what we call a ‘revolving door.’ A revolving door means that people leave Wall Street and Corporate America, go into government, do the bidding of Wall Street and Corporate America, and then go back to the private sector. In fact, in the last 30 years, Goldman Sachs has given this country two Secretaries of the Treasury, one under a Republican administration, and one under a Democratic administration. That's how the system works. Big money gets their people into government, who work for big money. …. That is how the system works. That's what power is about. That's why the 1 percent gets richer while everybody else gets poorer.

Sanders diagnostic framing here stands in stark contrast to the partisan framing used by Clinton. Sanders indicts the relationship between Wall Street and government, which Sanders believes constitute “oligarchy” and lead to the creation of a “rigged”

90 political and economic system. It is important to note that Sanders does not hesitate to blame both Democratic and Republican administrations for contributing to the “revolving door” between Wall Street and government.

Sanders also used diagnostic framing during this period to focus on the size and power of major financial institutions. Sanders argued that the major institutions on Wall

Street were so large that they had become “an island unto themselves” that created an inherent risk to the economy in a speech on January 6, 2016,

We bailed out Wall Street because they were “too big to fail.” It turns out three out of the four largest banks in America today are bigger than they were when we bailed them out because they were “too big to fail.” It turns out that the six largest financial institutions in America have assets equivalent to 60 percent of the GDP in this country, issue two thirds of the credit cards and writing one third of the mortgages. Clinton and Sanders also offered different prognostic frames for dealing with

Wall Street during the second phase of the campaign. Clinton’s primary prognosis for

Wall Street involved three ideas: elect Democrats, protect and expand the Dodd-Frank

Act, and encourage Wall Street bankers to think in the long-term. First, Clinton argued throughout the campaign that the economy does better when Democrats are in office. She presented a narrative of economic progress under Democratic administrations and economic decline under Republicans. Second, Clinton spoke throughout the campaign of the need to empower regulators to oversee Wall Street and encourage a shift from short term to long term thinking in the financial industry. This is part of Clinton’s push to move beyond “quarterly capitalism.” Third, Clinton continued to defend and expand

Dodd-Frank, contending that, “no bank should be too big to fail. No executive should be too powerful to jail” but stopped short of suggesting that banks should be broken up.

91 During the second phase of the campaign, Sanders continued to support the same prognostic framing devices he had used during the beginning of the campaign. He advocated for an updated version of Glass-Steagall legislation. He called for breaking up the big banks. He called for imposing a speculation tax on Wall Street to fund higher education. Clinton responded by attempting to portray Sanders as a “single issue candidate” whose relentless focus on Wall Street was detrimental to his focus on other issues, particularly those that affect women and people of color. In a speech on February

13, 2016, Clinton asked a rhetorical question of the audience: “not everything is about an economic theory, right?” She then continued to ask pointed rhetorical questions, implicitly directed at Sanders:

If we broke up the big banks tomorrow — and I will, if they deserve it, if they pose a systemic risk, I will — would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?

Clinton would use this prognostic framing as a critique of Sanders’ position on

Wall Street. On February 27, 2016, Clinton argued that, “America isn’t a single-issue country. We need more than a plan for the biggest banks.” According to this framing, racism, sexism, and homophobia are viewed as being unrelated to the political and economic behavior of Wall Street. This framing directly rejects Sanders’ contention that

Wall Street is a major center of political and economic power whose actions have enormous repercussions for the lives of all Americans. Instead, she rejected a systemic critique of Wall Street in favor of depicting the financial sector as a “single-issue” unrelated to other concerns. The implicit assumption is that concern over Wall Street is a white male issue that does nothing to improve the lives of women or people of color. This was part of a larger effort by the Clinton campaign to portray Sanders as being

92 obsessively focused on the economy to the detriment of minority groups. In this sense, we can see a difference between Clinton and Sanders’ diagnostic and prognostic framing of the relationship between racism and sexism to economic inequality. Clinton frames such discrimination as being separate issues from Wall Street and economic inequality, while Sanders sees combatting economic inequality as being a key component of the fight to end racism and sexism.

Contrary to Clinton’s portrayal of Sanders as a single-issue candidate, however,

Sanders did draw connections between Wall Street policy and issues affecting the lives of minority groups. One example of this is that Sanders connected white collar crime on

Wall Street to the war on drugs that disproportionately targets African-American men. In multiple speeches throughout the campaign, Sanders compared the imprisonment rates for African-American youth charged with marijuana possession and Wall Street CEO’s charged with white collar crime. Sanders began using this framing during the first phase of the campaign and continued using it throughout. One of the most prominent examples of this was in July 25, 2015, when Sanders noted,

The War on Drugs has been a failure and has ruined the lives of too many people. African-Americans comprise 14 percent of regular drug users but are 37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses. From 1980 to 2007, about one in three adults arrested for drugs was African-American. It is an obscenity that we stigmatize so many young Americans with a criminal record for smoking marijuana, but not one major Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for causing the near collapse of our entire economy. This must change.

In this statement, Sanders highlighted racial disparities in drug arrests in relation to white collar crime on Wall Street. This point emphasizes the connection between how different crimes are stigmatized and punished disproportionately based on perception of race and power, rather than actual magnitude of harm. Sanders made the connection

93 between racial injustice and economic inequality even more clear in the same speech, stating,

But what Martin Luther King saw in 1968 — and what we all should recognize today — is that it is useless to try to address race without also taking on the larger issue of inequality. He was planning a poor people's march on Washington that would include not only African-Americans but also Latinos, Native Americans and poor Appalachian whites. He envisioned a rainbow of the dispossessed, assembled to demand not just an end to discrimination but a change in the way the economy doles out its spoils. . . We need to simultaneously address the structural and institutional racism which exists in this country, while at the same time vigorously attacking the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality which is making the very rich much richer while everyone else — especially the African- American community and working-class whites — are becoming poorer.

Sanders also struck back at Clinton by pointing out her close connections to Wall

Street, including giving private speeches to Wall Street executives and received campaign contributions from Wall Street. On March 5, 2016, Sanders explained Clinton’s connection to Wall Street and chided her for not releasing transcripts of her private speeches,

Secretary Clinton has a number of Super PAC’s. One of her Super PAC’s recently reported that they raised $15 million from Wall Street alone. … And as some of you know, Clinton has given a number of speeches behind closed doors to Wall Street. In fact, she has been paid $225,000 per speech. Now, I kind of think if you're going to be paid $225,000 for a speech, it must be a fantastic speech. A brilliant speech which you would want to share with the American people, right? You know, $225,000, that must be an extraordinary speech. A Shakespearean speech. And we all look forward to seeing it.

During the last phase of the campaign, Clinton had an average Wall Street orientation score of 2.5 compared to a score of 4 for Sanders. This indicated that Clinton ended the campaign taking a mixed position, while Sanders took a partially democratic socialist position. This can be seen in the use of diagnostic framing. During this time,

Clinton began to shift her diagnostic framing of Wall Street. She adopted some of

Sanders language and phrasing, particularly in terms of negative valence framing. For

94 example, on July 12, 2016, Clinton argued that Wall Street’s greed had created a “rigged economy.” During her acceptance speech at the DNC on July 28, Clinton took a populist tone and blamed Wall Street for “wrecking main street.” However, Clinton continued to use the same diagnostic frames that she had used since the beginning of the campaign.

During the final phase of the campaign, Sanders had backed off some of his fierier rhetoric against Wall Street and struck a more conciliatory pose. In his final speeches of the campaign, Sanders continued to recite his familiar lines against the

“greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street” as part of his diagnostic framing. However, he also adopted many of the Clinton campaign’s narratives focused on partisan blame. He argued that Obama’s leadership pulled the country out of the Great

Recession, and that Republicans were to blame for obstructionism.

Turning to prognostic framing, Clinton did not lay out a systemic policy analysis of Wall Street in her final speech, thus leaving her specific policy on this issue somewhat vague. She continued to discuss the need to “go beyond” Dodd-Frank. She called for an increase in taxes on Wall Street. She called for “tough reforms” to curb Wall Street abuse. She did not, however, provide specific policy details on these prognostic frames.

In terms of prognostic framing, Sanders also failed to offer specific policy details regarding Wall Street reform during the final phase of the campaign. Sanders continued to offer vague calls for breaking up the big banks, but by this time he did so in the context of endorsing the Democratic Party. On July 25, 2016, Sanders proclaimed, “the

Democratic Party now calls for breaking up the major financial institutions on Wall

Street and the passage of a twenty-first century Glass-Steagall Act,” as had been reflected on the recently adopted 2016 Democratic Party Platform.

95 Discussion

Implications

The results of my analyses offer a number of important insights into my research questions. First, my quantitative content analysis illustrated the salience of education, health care, Wall Street to the candidates. My findings indicate that education was the most salient issue overall, and that all three issues were more salient to Sanders’ campaign than to Clinton’s. My second research question concerned how the salience of these three issues changed over the course of the campaign. However, my research was not able to determine the cause behind changes in issue saliency. Instead, my research attempted to describe the changes when they did occur. In this regard, the most significant pattern that emerged in the final phase of the campaign, when Clinton was wrapping up the nomination and Sanders was preparing to drop out and endorse Clinton.

During this time, both Clinton and Sanders began to change the frequency at which they mentioned the three issues. This is most likely due to an attempt by the candidates to downplay their differences and seek out a compromise on the issues as the Clinton nomination became certain.

My third research question was concerned with how Clinton and Sanders framed the three issues in relation to neoliberalism and democratic socialism. In this regard, the

Sanders campaign can be roughly classified as democratic socialist in its orientation to the three issues, while the Clinton campaign can be classified as neoliberal. Broadly speaking, the Clinton campaign offered a narrative of steady, slow progress under

Democratic administrations, with lulls in progress being attributed to Republican intransigence. In other words, her diagnostic framing was partisan: the Republicans are to

96 blame for the mess. Clinton’s prognoses for the three issues were largely confined to market-driven means-tested programs that offered to expand President Obama’s policies while still falling short of supporting universal decommodified public goods.

The Sanders campaign, on the other hand, was primarily democratic socialist in that Sanders framed all three issues within the context of the central observation that the

US political and economic system is rigged by the business elite. Sanders identified the blame for the three issues as being deeper and more systemic than just Republican obstructionism. Sanders blamed both Republicans and Democrats for their failures to confront corporate power on behalf of the American public. Sanders’ policy solutions to the three issues also focused on universal programs that would be available to the entire

US population regardless of income. In this sense, then, Sanders can be classified as taking a democratic socialist orientation to the issues.

However, there were some interesting changes and nuances in how the candidates’ framing of the issues changed as the campaign progressed. This addresses my fourth research question: how did the candidates’ issue orientation change over time?

Broadly speaking, there were three major shifts in the candidates’ issue orientation framing. The first phase covers the campaign launch up until the end of October 2015.

During this phase, both candidates established their initial framings of the issues, with

Clinton taking a neoliberal position and Sanders taking a democratic socialist one. During this period, candidate messaging remained fairly consistent, varying slightly from speech to speech. Sanders, for example, often used the same lines verbatim from speech to speech. A number of scholars have noted that Sanders’ repetitive messaging was

97 designed to transform public consciousness and shift the national discourse to the left

(Lenchner; 2015; Rehmann 2016; Chibber 2017; Sunkara 2018).

A shift in issue orientation framing began to occur in late 2015 and early 2016, as the candidates began to directly respond to each other’s positions. This back-and-forth debate between the candidates had two results. First, it led the candidates to strengthen their own initial positions and push back against objections from their opponents. This can be seen in Clinton’s dismissal of Sanders’ support for single payer health care as an untested “theory.” Second, the candidates during this phase of the campaign began to incorporate some of the language of their opponents into their own speeches even while remaining entrenched in their initial issue orientation. For instance, Clinton began to use the language of “universal health care” while supporting a policy that was market-driven and means-tested. This allowed Clinton to incorporate some of Sanders’ rhetoric and ideas into her own policy without fully endorsing his democratic socialist prognostic framing. Sanders continued to endorse democratic socialist prognostic framing during this period, and began to clarify and reinforce his positions after Clinton’s criticism.

Sanders also began to directly address to the Clinton campaign during this period, such as chiding Clinton for not releasing transcripts of private speeches she had given before

Wall Street.

A final shift in issue orientation occurred during the month of July 2016, when the

Sanders campaign was winding down and beginning to endorse Clinton in the general election. During this time, Sanders and Clinton began to emphasize common ground and shared goals and visions for the future. During this phase, the candidates sought to reframe their positions to accommodate their opponent. However, it is critical to note that

98 the candidates modified their positions in the context of their original ideological viewpoint. In other words, Clinton modified her education policy to accommodate support for Sanders’ goal of tuition-free colleges and universities. However, instead of fully endorsing tuition-free education, Clinton advocated a means-tested plan that would restrict the program to families earning less than $125,000. This reframing, then, did not signal Clinton’s ideological transformation from neoliberal to democratic socialist.

Instead, Clinton stayed within her original ideological position, but sought to incorporate elements of the democratic socialist position into her own neoliberal framework.

Likewise, though Sanders offered an endorsement of Clinton’s neoliberal policies at the end of the campaign, he did not abandon his commitment to democratic socialism.

Instead, he sought to reframe Clinton’s neoliberal positions as a stepping stone that could lead to the realization of a more robust democratic socialist program. In other words, we did not see a shift in ideological orientation, but rather an attempt by the candidates to incorporate their opponent’s positions into their own original ideological position.

Why did this shift occur during final phase of the campaign? It is most likely that

Clinton and Sanders both recognized a mutual interest in compromise. Having lost the nomination, Sanders most likely believed that he could push Clinton to the left by offering his endorsement of her campaign in the general election. This also allowed

Sanders to push for change to the Democratic Party’s 2016 platform. In addition, working together with Clinton helped Sanders avoid the accusation of being a spoiler, something that is commonly used to discredit insurgency campaigns. Sanders likely saw a greater benefit in compromising with Clinton rather than potentially throwing the election in favor of the Republicans. Clinton also had her own set of motives for compromising with

99 Sanders at the end of the campaign. Compromising with Sanders, using “universalist” language, and incorporating elements of Sanders’ proposals into her own policy allowed

Clinton to affect the appearance of a leftward shift in order to appeal to Sanders’ supporters. This allowed her to secure the nomination and prevent mass disaffection from

Sanders’ voters.

However, this analysis reveals that the battle for the soul of the Democratic Party, as it played out in the 2016 presidential primary, was fought within a limited set of policy constraints. Sanders’ brand of democratic socialism challenged certain aspects of market logic, such as health care and education, while still endorsing an overall commitment to capitalism and the market economy as a whole. This distinguished Sanders from further left-wing variants of socialism. And many of Clinton’s positions supported an expansion of government services to segments of the population currently being unserved or underserved; only Clinton largely favored market-driven and means-tested approaches to achieve this goal, whereas Sanders supported universal social programs. Nonetheless, the major difference between the candidates played out over a set of limited policy constraints.

Limitations

There are a number of limitations with this research project. The first limitation has to do with the dataset. Clinton and Sanders did not make their complete list of campaign speeches during the 2016 election publicly available. Therefore, I was not able to establish the total number of speeches given during the entire primary campaign. As a result, my sampling procedure necessarily involved convenience and purposive sampling.

A complete list of all campaign speeches would have allowed me to place the speeches

100 on a timeline and draw a sample that reflected standardized time intervals. This would also have helped me in establishing causation when analyzing the changes in salience and orientation over time.

A second limitation was the limited selection of issues. Due to limitations in time and resources, I choose three issues to analyze for this project. With more time, I could have incorporated more issues, which might have produced a fuller picture of the candidates’ framing techniques. It is possible that the three issues I chose were not representative of how the candidates framed the issues as a whole. In other words, it is possible that education, health care, and Wall Street were issues that the candidates discussed differently than they did other issues on the campaign trail. I chose these three issues due to their relevance to the debate over neoliberalism and democratic socialism.

However, I cannot rule out the possibility that my selection of these three issues magnified the divisions between Clinton and Sanders. If I had selected three different issues instead, it is possible that I would have seen a different set of responses from the candidates.

Third, my project was limited in its ability to establish causality when it came to changes in issue salience and orientation over time. This is because I was not able to control variables outside of the two candidates’ campaign speeches themselves. While my analysis indicates that the candidates did directly address and respond to their opponents at certain points during the campaign, it is impossible for me to determine if the candidates changed their salience or orientation because of their opponent, or if the changes were due to factors inside or outside their respective campaigns. Candidate framing could have changed in response to inside factors, such as the strategic decisions

101 made by the campaign team or reactions to internal polling data. Candidates could also have changed their framing in response to outside forces, such as media coverage or major current events.

Fourth, my attempt to use diagnostic and prognostic framing to create a numerical score for the candidates’ issue orientation on a 5-point scale presented some basic difficulties. This was due to the fact that the 5-point scale was designed to track changes between two ideal-type positions of neoliberalism and democratic socialism. However, most of the changes that occurred in my sample were not dramatic ideological transformations reflecting a candidate’s move from a neoliberal position to a democratic socialist one, or vice versa. Instead, most of the changes occurred within the same ideological framework. So, for example, Clinton began incorporating some of the language of democratic socialism but using it to advocate for a neoliberal policy. In these cases, the 5-point issue orientation scale was not as insightful as the qualitative analysis was at telling the story of how the candidates’ positions were changing. However, the issue orientation scale did capture something important. Namely, the candidates’ positions on the issues did not move much over the course of the campaign, and that the reframing that did occur happened largely within the original ideological orientations the candidates started with. The issue orientation scale illustrates that the candidates did not change positions as much as I had first assumed.

Finally, my project was limited by the fact that I only explored the Clinton and

Sanders campaigns. Due to time constraints, I was unable to consider the other contenders for the Democratic nomination, and I completely ignored the Republican

Party presidential primary. I also was unable to continue my analysis of Clinton’s

102 speeches during the general election, which might have provided more useful information about neoliberalism and its ongoing crisis. A comparison of Republican and Democratic presidential primaries would also have allowed me to fully flesh out the ideological spectrum on these issues, ranging from neoliberalism to far-right authoritarian populism.

Future Research

Future researchers can expand upon this study by pursuing several different paths that I have laid out in this project. First, researchers can analyze the diagnostic and prognostic framing of the Republican Party primary campaign. Second, future research could offer an analysis, not just of the primaries but of the general election as well. This would be particularly interesting in Clinton’s case, as it would allow for researchers to see if Clinton’s issue salience and orientations changed between the Sanders campaign and the general election against Trump. Did Clinton shift to the left during the general election, or did she pivot towards the right as she squared off against Trump? Did Clinton continue to emphasize education, health care, and Wall Street during the general election, or did she shift her focus towards other topics? Third, future researchers could also expand upon this study by analyzing different policy issues beyond the three issues that I selected for my analysis. It is possible that different dynamics might emerge when studying the candidates’ framing of other issues.

A fourth area for future study might examine the candidates’ issue salience and orientation in the context of events that occurred outside of the campaign itself. There are many ways this could be accomplished. One method would be to examine public opinion polls in regards to education, health care, and Wall Street to see how candidate framing matched up with public opinion. Did public support for universal health care increase or

103 decrease after Sanders began his campaign? Did Clinton begin mentioning education more frequently in her speeches in response to public opinion polls showing that education was a major concern of the voters? A sophisticated analysis could examine opinion polls on a range of issues and compare the difference between national polling, polling of Democratic voters, and polling of voters in specific locations, such as the cities where the candidates are giving their speeches or the states where primaries and caucuses are occurring. This would allow future researchers to see if Clinton and Sanders modified their speeches to address the specific concerns of the audiences they were addressing.

A final area for future research concerns the question of utilizing issue framing as a criterion to measure the success or failure of intra-party insurgency campaigns.

Although Sanders lost the nomination, he may have affected the Democratic Party and

US politics as a whole. Future researchers could measure the success of the Sanders campaign and intra-party insurgencies more broadly in terms of their ability to shift the party establishment’s issue framing to the left (or right). Did the insurgent candidate succeed in pushing the establishment candidate to adopt new issues, to reframe issues in a direction that is more favorable to the insurgent candidate, or to support new policies in the party platform? Researchers can also explore the connection between insurgent campaigns and future legislative victories. For example, did Sanders’ focus on health care lead the Democratic Party to introduce new legislation on health care? Another way to measure the success of insurgent campaigns would be to look at the ideological positions of congressional candidates who run in the party primary. Did congressional candidates in future elections adopt the issue frames of the establishment candidate or the insurgent candidate? Although it is still too early to do this with the 2016 election, researchers in

104 the coming years could examine the 2018 and 2020 elections to see if Democratic Party candidates have adopted issue framings closer to Clinton or Sanders. Future research may also measure the success of intra-party insurgencies not by their influence on the party establishment, but on the opinion of the voting public. Thus, there is a need to connect intra-party insurgency campaigns with data from public opinion polling. Did public opinion become more favorable to the insurgent candidate’s position on the issues? These questions would prove to be a fruitful line of inquiry for researchers to explore.

105 CONCLUSION

This thesis project fills a gap in the literature by exploring the diagnostic and prognostic framing devices used by Clinton and Sanders during the highly contested 2016

Democratic Party primary campaign. The purpose of this study is to explore the ways in which the candidates framed their positions on education, health care, and Wall Street, in relation to the ideological positions of neoliberalism and democratic socialism. This frame analysis of the 2016 Democratic Party primary provides insight into the larger crisis of legitimacy that neoliberalism is experiencing. This legitimation crisis can be seen in the rise of the intra-party insurgency Sanders campaign which attempted to shift the quasi-incumbent Clinton campaign to the left by relentlessly focusing on economic inequality and the need for universal social programs. The results of the election indicated that Clinton and Sanders both modified their positions to reach a compromise, with Clinton adopting some of Sanders’ universalist language while still supporting market-driven means-tested policies. Therefore, neither Clinton or Sanders underwent an ideological transformation from neoliberalism to democratic socialism, or vice versa.

Instead, the candidates sought to incorporate elements of their opponent’s proposals within the context of their own ideological positions. By focusing on issue framing in a highly-contested election, this research project has offered new insights into the academic literature on the 2016 Democratic Party primary, the crisis of neoliberalism, and the phenomenon of intra-party insurgencies. This thesis adds to the debate over neoliberalism and democratic socialism that continues to animate the Democratic Party today.

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123 APPENDIX: RESEARCH PROTOCOL

1. Candidate Name:

2. Date of Speech:

3. Location:

4. Word Count:

5. Source:

6. Education:

6a. Diagnostic Frames:

6b. Prognostic Frames:

7. Health Care:

7a. Diagnostic Frames:

7b. Prognostic Frames:

8: Wall Street:

8a. Diagnostic Frames:

8b. Prognostic Frames:

9. Summary:

9a. Education:

9b. Health Care:

9c. Wall Street:

10. Miscellaneous:

124