In the spirit of the election season, I thought I might step back and take a look at one of the dominant features of campaigns in recent years: the rally. The modern rally differs in many respects from 20th-century precursors, as it does from other forms of political media. But it in some ways represents a return to much older forms of civic political engagement.

There’s plenty of academic research and commentary revealing what gets communicated at rallies. But only recently have observers like Dan Paget begun to consider whether and how a politician’s message that is communicated at a rally is different from the message transmitted through other channels. Paget posits, for example, “that what politicians communicate at rallies as ‘speakers’ may not be the same as what they say via other media.”