The 1996 presidential election is 11 months away. As the candidates climb podiums and give speeches, Americans will listen intently. But what will they hear? Relevant facts or meaningless rhetoric?

To gauge the importance of the information presidential candidates provide, 11 undergraduate students, under the supervision of five graduate students from the Annenberg School for Communication, are creating a Campaign Discourse Quality Index (CDQI). "This will be used to measure the quality of the discourse of a political campaign," explained Megin Adams, a second-year graduate student. "Essentially, we are trying to come up with a scale. When the 1996 campaign starts up, we can use the scale...to judge the quality of the debate going on at the time."

"The point of the research is political accountability," added Jordy Harris, a junior in the College. "Are the candidates making empty claims, or are they engaging their opponents? How well are they informing the voters?"

Funding for this research came from the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation. "What's important about the grant from the University's standpoint is that this is the first large-scale effort on the part of the Annenberg School to involve undergraduates in research," said Dean Kathleen Hall Jamieson.

"We've involved them on a smaller scale in the past in other grants, but this time we actually have more undergraduate students working on the grant than graduate students. We've drawn them from across campus, and they're doing an excellent job.

"The goal of [President Rodin] is to try and create more research opportunities for undergraduates," she continued. "So the undergraduates will actually be invited to a conference next summer in Washington to issue a report on the project."

Students in the project are examining four elections: 1960, 1980, 1988 and 1992. Dean Jamieson chose these years because they represent the broad spectrum of political discourse.

"Sixty and '80 were years with high voter satisfaction with the choices," she said. "There was relatively high interest in the campaigns themselves. In '88, there was very low voter satisfaction in the choices, very low interest. In '92, there was an upswing in interest. Sixty is the high point of voter participation since World War I. Eighty-eight is the low point of voter participation since World War I.

"We're also trying to get paired races, historically. So we have two races with incumbent vice presidents running and two races with incumbent presidents. We have Republicans elected half the time, and Democrats elected half the time. We also have two years in which the exit polls show voters rejecting the incumbent."

As part of the research, responsibilities normally left to graduate students are being given to the undergraduates, according to Dean Jamieson. One candidate is assigned to each undergraduate, who must thoroughly analyze that candidate's speeches.

"We...study from one to 12 speeches, from the time of the conventions to election eve," Ms. Harris said. "We isolate any claim that a candidate makes in a speech and look for evidence supporting it."

This process of finding and proving claims, called coding, must be performed carefully. "Claims have to be something that has substance," Ms. Harris said. "It can't just be 'I love America.' It must inform voters of something they don't already know."

Once the undergraduates finish the coding, the graduate students must monitor its reliability. "We had to work out the coding scheme," Ms. Adams said. "That was really challenging. It can be a very subjective process. We had to transform something subjective into something objective. So we had to read a lot of speeches and come up with rules and work out the exceptions to the rules."

Of the five graduate students, one reviews the coding and performs the data analysis. The other four oversee the elections--one year per student. "The four of us will be writing papers that will become a report," Ms. Adams said. "We are picking up some of the nuances that the coding scheme doesn't."

By dissecting past campaigns, the project will ultimately deliver a model for measuring the discourse of future elections. "We're trying to provide a set of norms...that let us examine the discourse while it is happening during a presidential campaign, to indicate whether it's fallen short of past norms," Dean Jamieson said. "For example, in 1988, the discourse by virtually every measure was poor. There was a high level of attack, there wasn't much advocacy of alternative positions, the ads were unprecedentedly negative, we had a minimal amount of press contact, many questions asked by the press in debates and conferences weren't answered by the candidates."

In stark contrast, 1960 was a stellar year for political discourse. "It is seen as a really good campaign," Ms. Adams noted. "Nixon and Kennedy really engaged each other and provided evidence. The public watching got a lot of solid information, whereas 1988 is seen as a low point, just a lot of attacking the opponent without much evidence."

The research indicates that the last presidential election was a step in the right direction--more information and less negativity. "There has been an improvement in the discourse, at least from 1988 to 1992," Ms. Harris said. "We're hoping that it gets progressively better."

Thanks to their work, the students can do more than hope--they can take an active role in the improvement of political discourse. "During the '96 election, there will be frequent press conferences," Ms. Adams explained. "Notices will go out to the press saying the level of discourse has been really bad and this is why, and we can say that because we'll have a scale comparing it to other elections we've studied."

And next year's election is just the beginning. "During the 1996 campaign and every general election after that," Dean Jamieson said, "we'd like to be able to provide a weekly commentary about the discourse of the past week using the historical norms."