Skip to content

How to Apply a Rhetorical Approach to Political Communication Technology Research

PIT in Practice: Missouri University of Science & Technology

by Ryan Cheek, Ph.D. (Missouri S&T) and Samuel T. Allen, Ph.D. (Randolph-Macon College)

Is your smartphone lighting up with text messages from political campaigns? You’re not alone. Texting and other digital marketing technologies provide campaigns with unprecedented, direct access to voters — evidenced by the 15 billion political text messages sent during the 2022 U.S. midterm elections alone. Though the medium might be relatively new, the strategy is part of the age-old practice of rhetoric: the art and science of persuasive communication.

Jump to: Missouri S&T’s 4 Keys to PIT & Ethical Communication.

Our goal is to shift the conversation from short-term voter manipulation to long-term voter engagement.

Unfortunately, political text messages are often part of a larger rhetorical strategy of manipulation, designed to drive quick, emotional responses that short-circuit political deliberation and promote divisive, polarized debates. How can public interest technology practitioners bring light to these deceptive practices and push for digital communication technologies that respect voter autonomy, the value of transparency, and democracy itself?

As researchers at very different institutions — one, a STEM-dominant university and the other a small liberal arts college — we’ve developed a process of rhetorical analysis to uncover the ethical and political implications of these technologies, while building a space for our students to contribute meaningfully to PIT research on political communication. 

Here, we explain our approach, describe students’ contributions to this work, and outline four PIT principles to guide the design of future political communication technologies.

What is Public Interest Technology?

5 Keys to Institutionalizing PIT

What is PIT-UN?

Rhetorical Methods as Tools for Examining Political Communication Technology

Rhetorical methods are systematic approaches to examining how a speaker’s choice of language, symbols, and stories interact to construct meaning and motivate audience behavior. Revealing the persuasive strategies and power dynamics embedded in political communication technology requires a critical toolbox capable of unpacking the meaning and implications of metaphors, enthymemes, hyperbole, and other rhetorical devices.

Many campaigns rely on emotional manipulation, using fear-based messaging, guilt-tripping, and clickbait subject lines to drive immediate voter action. These tactics may produce short-term gains but often lead to voter fatigue, disillusionment, and a breakdown of trust in political communication.

By applying rhetorical analysis, we can better understand these tactics and advocate for more ethical approaches. Our goal is to shift the conversation from short-term voter manipulation to long-term voter engagement, fostering a political communication ecosystem that respects voter autonomy and prioritizes informed participation.

Students from Missouri S&T’s First Year Research Experience (FYRE) program present their research findings. Courtesy of Missouri S&T.

Students Unpack Manipulative Political Communication Designs

Our research into manipulative political communication design has been enriched by the dedication of our student research assistants, who have been integral to the process.

 One student from Missouri S&T’s interdisciplinary First Year Research Experience (FYRE) program, Sofia (a pseudonym used for student privacy) took on the critical task of analyzing the interface designs of political donation pages. She learned how to apply a digital rhetoric method called critical interface analysis, which examines the relationship between interfaces (speakers), users (audiences), and ideologically motivated manipulative design (persuasion). 

Sofia’s research focused on how campaigns use deceptive interface design techniques, also known as dark patterns, such as trick wording, preselected recurring donation boxes, and obstructive pop-ups that can mislead donors to sign up for contributions they did not intend to make. Sofia’s findings were presented at a virtual summer conference, shedding light on how these subtle, manipulative design choices exploit donors’ generosity and undermine their trust in political campaigns.

Findings from Missouri S&T’s student researchers on political donation pages.

Another student, Jade Schneider, whose work was funded by the Missouri S&T’s Office of the Vice Chancellor of Research and Innovation, was instrumental in helping us set up technical infrastructure for collecting political advertising, emails, and texts. She learned how political marketing differed from business marketing and how to collect political communication data from Google’s Ad Transparency Center, Meta’s Ad Library, and other sources.

Jade combined these new skills with her background in technical communication to help us develop systems for capturing and categorizing ads, texts, and emails using Google tools (Apps Script, Drive, and Sheets) and the qualitative data analysis software ATLAS.ti. Without Jade’s efforts in creating this robust data-collection pipeline, we wouldn’t have the breadth of materials necessary to analyze the reach of these manipulative tactics. Her work allows us to keep expanding our corpus, ensuring that we can track trends over multiple election cycles. She is now applying her PIT skills as a data scientist for Accenture Federal Services.

The students are learning firsthand how subtle choices in interface design or data collection systems can have far-reaching consequences for voter behavior and trust. Their projects have provided invaluable data for our research while giving the students a real-world understanding of the ethical challenges that come with designing and analyzing communication technologies and equipping them with the skills to engage ethically with technology in their future careers. 

4 Principles of Public Interest Technology and Ethical Communication

PIT emphasizes such ethical principles as transparency, respect, and accountability — values that align closely with rhetorical approaches to communication. By integrating these two approaches, we can design political communication tools that build trust and promote informed voter decision-making.

Based on our research findings, here are four PIT principles for political communication technologies that can support, rather than harm, healthy voter engagement and democracy:

1. Ethical Communication Design: Communication tools should be designed with transparency and respect for the user. Avoiding pre-checked recurring donation boxes and other manipulative design elements can help restore trust between voters and campaigns.

2. Promoting Informed Participation: Rhetorical strategies can also shift political communication from emotional manipulation toward educating voters. Political texts and emails should focus on providing information voters need to make thoughtful decisions — whether that’s policy updates, voter resources, or event details — rather than using fear or deception to trigger knee-jerk reactions. This approach respects voter agency and aligns with PIT’s goal of empowering individuals through technology.

3. Building Trust through Transparency: Transparency is central to voter trust, and campaigns should be upfront about how they collect and use voter data. By creating systems that responsibly gather and categorize political communications, PIT researchers can hold campaigns accountable for their messaging tactics and data usage. Voters deserve to know how their information is being used and should have the option to easily opt out.

4. Leveraging Positive Reinforcement: Instead of using fear or guilt to drive voter action, campaigns can use positive rhetorical appeals that emphasize the impact of collective action. Messages that thank voters for their participation and highlight the progress they’ve helped achieve can build long-term relationships, rather than treating voters as financial targets.

Learn More About Our Work

Rhetorical methods offer powerful tools for collaboratively advancing the goals of public interest technology in political communication. This work, enriched by the contributions of our students, both strengthens democratic participation and aligns with PIT’s mission to create technologies and technologists that serve the public good. To learn more about our work, check out these recent publications:

 

Allen, S. T. (2022). Donald Trump Isn’t Laughing: Affect, Laughter, and Hegemonic Masculinity. In The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect (pp. 310–320). Routledge.

Cheek, R., & Allen, S. T. (2024). Hoodies in the Halls of Power: a Rhetorical Materialist Critique of Professional Decorum in the United States Senate. In the proceedings of the IEEE International Professional Communication Conference (ProComm ’24), July 14–17, Pittsburgh, PA (pp. 54–58). IEEE.

Cheek, R., & Allen, S. T. (2023). Professionalizing Campaign Text Spam: How Technical Marketing Rhetoric Influences Rapid Change to the Professional Communication of Politics. In the proceedings of the IEEE International Professional Communication Conference (ProComm ’23), July 17–20, Ithaca, NY (pp. 190–194). IEEE.

Cheek, R. (2023). Making a case for political technical communication (PxTC). Technical Communication Quarterly, 32(2), 121–133.

Cheek, R. (2021). Political technical communication and ideographic communication design in a pre-digital congressional campaign. Communication Design Quarterly Review, 8(4), 4–14.

 

Subscribe to the PIT UNiverse Newsletter

Related Posts

Meet five students who are building community and career opportunities while charting paths in public interest technology (PIT).

Teams of faculty and students at U Michigan conduct interdisciplinary research to identify the climate impacts of emerging technologies.

Through new courses, degree programs and an interdisciplinary center, CMU is steering AI development toward the public interest