Iran and US General Election Debates (from 2004-2016)

This paper examines US general election debates to discover whether or not the Republican and Democratic candidates equally present Iran as a major US foreign policy issue. Petrocik’s Issue Ownership theory was employed as the theoretical framework of this paper. The Issue Ownership theory asserts that since American voters perceive the Republican and Democratic parties to handle different sets of political, social, and economic issues better than their opponents, each party will highlight and emphasize issues that they are regarded to own during elections. In this regard, Petrocik’s theory predicts that since the Republican party is perceived to handle foreign policy and national security-related issues better than their Democratic opponents by American voters, their candidates are more likely to bring up foreign policy-related issues while Democrats are more likely to avoid such issues during presidential campaigns. Overall, 13 US general election debate transcripts from among the 16 General debates held from 2004 to 2016 were selected for analysis using the Critical Case Sampling approach. The analysis, which utilized the Critical Framework Analysis method, resulted in seven major thematic categories concerning Iran: nuclear program, threat, sanctions, negotiations, war, Iran’s influence, and sponsorship of terrorism. The study finds that although Republican candidates did present Iran as a major foreign policy issue more frequently than their opponents in US general election debates, there was an element of convergence on Iran. Therefore, contrary to what the Issue Ownership theory would have predicted, the Democrats did not typically avoid nor show any hesitancy in talking about Iran.