For more than four decades, Roderick P. Hart has successfully accomplished what so many try and fail to do: He has stood astride the dynamic gulf separating humanistic and social scientific approaches to the study of leadership and communication. In doing so, he has simultaneously mastered and shown respect for the close textual analysis favored by many in the humanities, while also remaining cautious in his causal inferences, favoring an overtly empirical approach to the placement of rhetorical artifacts in their specific contexts. Those familiar with Hart’s work will not be surprised to see these hallmarks of it continue in his most recent book, Political Tone, which he coauthored with Jay P. Childers and Colene J. Lind, both fellow communication scholars and former students of his.

The chief task of the book is to identify and observe political tone, the concept (though, as the subtitle indicates, explaining the concept’s dynamics is a clear concern, as well). The authors weave a web of metaphor and description—tone is described in different places as especially subtle, impertinent, and abiding (p. 220); as irrepressible but often mysterious (p. 11); as the amorphous understanding that “leaks out” (p. 21) of a text to reflect the author of said text’s understanding of the political world—to accompany their central understanding of their phenomenon: Tone is a tool that people use (sometimes unwittingly) to create distinct social impressions via word choice (pp. 9–10). In other words, political tone is how what is said is actually said (p. 24).

Having defined tone, the remainder of the book is predicated upon a complex assumption: that tone is the product of individual word choices that cumulatively build up to produce patterned expectations telling an audience something important about the speaker’s outlook on things (p. 12). From this intellectual platform, Hart, Childers, and Lind put forward a tripartite argument about political tone: Not only is it a “handy barometer” of how politicians cope with changing circumstances; tone is also a “subtle yet tangible force” that can be observed and evaluated scientifically as well as heuristically and, in doing so, can help explain Americans’ reactions to political events (p. 21), which the authors describe as both intuitive and inchoate.

Political Tone marks the continuation of a 15-year project focused on capturing what the authors call “the tonalities of American politics” (p. 19). To do so, they content-analyze texts from a wide range of genres—including campaign and policy speeches, debates, advertising, print and broadcast coverage, and letters to the editor—using computer-assisted text analysis. Specifically, their research presented utilizes DICTION 6.0, a java-based software program developed by Hart and Craig Carroll, which employs nearly three dozen word lists, comprised of approximately 10,000 search words, to discern a range of measurements that indicate systematically the way Americans talk politics. At the heart of these indicators are five master variables—certainty, optimism, activity, realism, and commonality—that represent the five things, according to the authors, that one would most want to know about the tone of a text if that was all that could be learned. These variables are constructed by combining conceptually linked sets of standardized measures, as are five additional custom dictionaries created for the purposes of the investigations specific to the goals of Political Tone: patriotic terms, party references, voter references, leader references, and religious terms.

The use of this approach to operationalize tonal observations from these genre sources enables Hart and colleagues to track dynamics about the ways in which political elites and the masses alike present their thoughts. Doing so further allows the authors to determine not only how language affects our perceptions but also how political institutions and personal circumstances affect a rhetor’s tone. The analyses of the book focus individually on eight separate forces, evenly divided between the dual categories of “broad-based societal forces” (p. 23) and personal factors, which impact the rhetorical choices of politicians. The societal forces include national diversity, party politics, modernity, and institutional development, while the personal circumstances are more idiosyncratic, based upon the authors’ understanding of four recent national politicians and how matters peculiar to their lives affected their word choice, or, as the authors put it, how they played the hands dealt to them (p. 23). For example, one chapter examines how President Bill Clinton coped with the Monica Lewinsky scandal, while another assesses the role that Sarah Palin’s “overweening ambition” (p. 24) played in her own word choice and the effects it had on the mass public.

The bulk of the book is comprised of eight stand-alone, chapter-length analyses, and while all of them are thoughtful and useful, it is the half that focuses on the broader social context that truly succeeds. Though illuminating, the essays in the second half of Political Tone trade away complexity in narrative for innovation in method, resulting in unique and persuasive interpretations of recent political history that fail to control for the leading and occasionally obvious alternatives. Nevertheless, Hart, Childers, and Lind’s efforts to communicate with the social sciences using its own vocabulary should appeal to political scientists, as will their emphasis on replicable data, systematic operationalization of core concepts, and application of tests of statistical significance before declaring conclusions (p. 19). That said, the nature of the work may leave some readers, particularly those attuned to the traditional question > theory > hypotheses > data > analysis model of inquiry, looking for more, as the book, despite its strong intellectual foundation and impressive scope, remains what the authors call “basic research.” That is, there is no central theoretical argument motivating its research, nor do the authors develop a comprehensive model from which obvious generalizations easily spring. As they note, “Our work is descriptive and we operate in a space somewhere between rigorous hypothesis testing and textual description” (p. 24).

Potential readers would do well, however, to consider that self-assessment as candid and humble, rather than as justification for overlooking this book. In the very least, it provides a thorough introduction to a research program (intellectual as much as software) that could be applied to countless current and future questions in political science. Much more than that, though, Hart, Childers, and Lind have provided careful, compelling evidence concerning the role that tone plays in political discourse and learning, and have contributed new and valuable knowledge to several areas of research in American politics, including but not limited to political parties, media, political knowledge, and our most recent presidents. Because of this, Political Tone will be of interest not only to scholars toiling in the relevant interdisciplinary fields but also to faculty and students alike interested in those subjects, as well as in political communication and leadership more broadly.