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  • Research Article

Evaluative Tone and the Five Candidate-Image Dimensions in Comparative Election News: A Nigeria–United States Analysis

Abdullahi Umar Babba1, Muhamad Fazil bin Ahmad1
1Faculty of Applied Social Sciences, Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin (UniSZA), Gong Badak Campus, 21300 Kuala Nerus, Terengganu, Malaysia
DOI: https://doi.org/10.70517/revcc2624139
Published: 08/10/2026
: Abdullahi Umar Babba, Muhamad Fazil bin Ahmad. Evaluative Tone and the Five Candidate-Image Dimensions in Comparative Election News: A Nigeria–United States Analysis. Revista Cultura Científica, 2026 Issue 24. pg. 1676-1688.

Abstract

Candidate image is often reduced to a single favourable–unfavourable score, a simplification that discards theoretically important distinctions between how positively a candidate is described and which specific qualities—such as competence, integrity, or viability—are being evaluated. This study examines both levels in a balanced corpus of 240 online election-news articles from four Nigerian and four United States outlets covering the 2023 Nigerian and 2024 United States presidential campaigns. Evaluative tone (positive, negative, neutral, or mixed) and five candidate-image dimensions—leadership competence, moral integrity, electability, emotional appeal, and national unity—were coded independently by two coders (mean Cohen’s kappa = .991). National context was associated with evaluative tone, chi-square(3, N = 240) = 10.26, p = .017, although no individual tone category reached the conventional residual threshold and the omnibus association weakened when individual outlets were removed. Three of the five candidate-image dimensions differed significantly by country under a Bonferroni correction (adjusted alpha = .01 across the five related tests): leadership competence, moral integrity, and electability. Negative electability judgements were markedly more common in the Nigerian corpus (15 articles) than in the United States corpus (1 article), and this result remained significant in every leave-one-outlet-out sensitivity check. Emotional appeal and national unity showed no detected country association at this sample size. The findings support treating overall tone and dimension-specific evaluation as related but distinct constructs and demonstrate that some cross-national candidate-image differences are substantially more robust to sample composition than others.

Keywords: candidate image, evaluative tone, framing, agenda-setting, comparative content analysis, electability

Abstract

Candidate image is often reduced to a single favourable–unfavourable score, a simplification that discards theoretically important distinctions between how positively a candidate is described and which specific qualities—such as competence, integrity, or viability—are being evaluated. This study examines both levels in a balanced corpus of 240 online election-news articles from four Nigerian and four United States outlets covering the 2023 Nigerian and 2024 United States presidential campaigns. Evaluative tone (positive, negative, neutral, or mixed) and five candidate-image dimensions—leadership competence, moral integrity, electability, emotional appeal, and national unity—were coded independently by two coders (mean Cohen’s kappa = .991). National context was associated with evaluative tone, chi-square(3, N = 240) = 10.26, p = .017, although no individual tone category reached the conventional residual threshold and the omnibus association weakened when individual outlets were removed. Three of the five candidate-image dimensions differed significantly by country under a Bonferroni correction (adjusted alpha = .01 across the five related tests): leadership competence, moral integrity, and electability. Negative electability judgements were markedly more common in the Nigerian corpus (15 articles) than in the United States corpus (1 article), and this result remained significant in every leave-one-outlet-out sensitivity check. Emotional appeal and national unity showed no detected country association at this sample size. The findings support treating overall tone and dimension-specific evaluation as related but distinct constructs and demonstrate that some cross-national candidate-image differences are substantially more robust to sample composition than others.

Keywords: candidate image, evaluative tone, framing, agenda-setting, comparative content analysis, electability

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Abdullahi Umar Babba
Faculty of Applied Social Sciences, Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin (UniSZA), Gong Badak Campus, 21300 Kuala Nerus, Terengganu, Malaysia
Muhamad Fazil bin Ahmad
Faculty of Applied Social Sciences, Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin (UniSZA), Gong Badak Campus, 21300 Kuala Nerus, Terengganu, Malaysia
mfazilahmad@unisza.edu.my

How to cite:

Abdullahi Umar Babba, Muhamad Fazil bin Ahmad. Evaluative Tone and the Five Candidate-Image Dimensions in Comparative Election News: A Nigeria–United States Analysis. Revista Cultura Científica, 2026 Issue 24. pg. 1676-1688.

Publication History

  • Received: 19/07/2026
  • Accepted: 02/10/2026
  • Published: 08/10/2026
Copyright © 2026, Abdullahi Umar Babba, Muhamad Fazil bin Ahmad. Published by Revista Cultura Científica. This article is published as open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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