Erik Bucy

Erik P. Bucy is the Marshall and Sharleen Formby Regents Professor of Strategic Communication in the College of Media and Communication at Texas Tech University. For the second half of 2018 he will be a visiting senior fellow in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests include visual and nonverbal analysis of news and politics, user engagement with media technologies, and normative theories of media and democracy. Bucy's scholarly work has been published in numerous leading journals in communication, information technology, and media politics. He is the author, with Maria Elizabeth Grabe, of Image Bite Politics: News and the Visual Framing of Elections (Oxford, 2009), winner of two outstanding book awards, and editor, with R. Lance Holbert, of the Sourcebook for Political Communication Research: Methods, Measures, and Analytical Techniques (Routledge, 2013). From 2009 to 2016, Bucy was the editor of Politics and the Life Sciences, the interdisciplinary flagship journal of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences. During his editorship, the journal became a publication of Cambridge University Press.

Prior to Texas Tech, Bucy was Vice President of Research at SmithGeiger, LLC, a Los Angeles-based media research consultancy, where he provided research analysis to a broad range of media and nonprofit clients—from local news stations and national networks to digital media companies and governmental agencies. Prior to market research, Bucy was a tenured associate professor at Indiana University, Bloomington with adjunct appointments in the Department of Political Science and School of Informatics. He has also held visiting and research appointments at the University of Oxford (2017), UCLA (2012), the University of Michigan (2007-08), and Dartmouth College (2005). His research on media credibility has been funded by the National Association of Broadcasters, his work on image bites by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University, and his analysis of televised presidential debates by the C-SPAN Education Foundation. At Texas Tech, Bucy has received the Billy I. Ross Faculty Achievement Award from the College of Media and Communication, along with the Barnie E. Rushing Faculty Distinguished Research Award. His research activities are regularly featured in the Texas Tech Today online campus newsletter and since spring 2017 he has hosted and moderated the Civil Counterpoints discussion series, which is broadcast on KTTZ-TV Channel 5 to the local Lubbock community.

Dr. Bucy received his Ph.D. in Mass Communication from the University of Maryland, College Park, his MA in Journalism from USC-Annenberg, and BA in English from UCLA. He is a native of Los Angeles and worked in the newspaper industry early in his career. A former staff writer for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Bucy served as deputy press secretary and national scheduler for Jerry Brown's 1992 presidential campaign.

Research

In the study of media and democracy political information and involvement is often studied from the perspective of institutions and elites, in other words, from the top or power center, rather than from the bottom or periphery of the system. My research takes a different approach, investigating civic involvement and media engagement from the point of view of the typical citizen or audience member who, in general, is not very attentive to the news or politics but who manages to make reliable assessments about events in the public sphere through information gleaned largely from mass media—and who feels some sense of connection to the political system through communication technology. Importantly, information from news can take the form of verbal narratives or visual images. Both play a vital role in informed citizenship, although images are under appreciated for their information value.

Though often overlooked in research, the nonverbal component of political news is vital to citizen understandings of political processes because visuals are more readily understood than verbally based communications and pronouncements. Visual processing, which is highly evolved, is also highly efficient and low cost in a cognitive sense, whereas verbal messages require a language system to convey meaning—and literacy levels in the mass audience are very uneven. Though they carry substantial meaning, images require no textual literacy, making nonverbal communication a potent vehicle for communicating political intentions via mass media.

Using this observation as a departure point, my work can be categorized into different streams of research. First, several of my experimental studies using information processing theory, affective intelligence, and principles of visual persuasion (which group into the emerging subfield of ‘media biopolitics') have examined the cognitive, emotional, and physiological consequences of leader portrayals on television news, particularly the nonverbal component of those portrayals. From this research I have derived a model of viewer processing of traumatic news, identified judgmental shortcuts viewers rely on to make sense of news and politics, and compared the influence of visual and verbal forms of persuasive influence on social media responses to nationally televised debates. This latter set of studies, which links biobehavioral and computational approaches to assess audience responses to televised politics, generally finds facial expressions, voice tone, and physical gestures to be more consistent and robust predictors of the volume and valence of Twitter expression than candidates' persuasive strategies, verbal utterances, policy stances during presidential debates.

In a second stream of research, I investigate how new communication technologies and media formats affect civic participation and assessments of political and media institutions. These studies address the interplay between media, politics, and emerging technologies. Here, a prediction I have advanced and found evidence for, dubbed the media participation hypothesis, holds that as political involvement becomes increasingly mediatized, intensive use of interactive public affairs media will produce a heightened sense of system satisfaction and political efficacy—a trend that should manifest itself longitudinally as media become ever more interactive in nature. With the growth of participatory platforms, we indeed see corresponding and statistically significant increases in political system efficacy (the perception of governmental responsiveness) among the heaviest users of these platforms. Though not without its downsides and dysfunctions, participatory media use affords citizens with continuous opportunities for civic engagement that traditional media and politics have historically resisted.

A third interest of mine, which pulls back from individual-level processes to consider larger civic and journalistic concerns, involves normative theories of media and democracy, including evaluations of media performance by citizens and elites. Here, I have examined the intellectual assumptions of political communication research and the purported crisis surrounding the news media's increasing structural role in campaigns, elections, and civic life generally. My two most recent books, the award-winning Image Bite Politics (Oxford, 2009) and my Sourcebook for Political Communication Research (Routledge, 2011/2013), provide new understandings of the political news landscape by demonstrating the meaning and influence of visual representations of presidential elections—and provide researchers with a comprehensive set of methods and measures to more effectively study the communicative dynamics that influence political outcomes.