Yes, Ronald Reagan's Rhetoric Was Unique—But Statistically,HowUnique?

Abstract

We use automated textual analysis to compare Ronald Reagan's rhetoric with that of presidents Woodrow Wilson through Barack Obama, using their State of the Union speeches. We are able to assign statistical significance to the thematic content, and to depict spatially the shifting dimensionality in themes used by presidents. We find strong evidence for Reagan's usage of the civil religion rhetoric: over half (59%) of the discourse in his seminal and 48% in his State of the Union speeches focus on civil religion. We also find an apparent shift in modern presidential rhetoric, from themes concerned with (1) institutions, to ones focused more on (2) individuals, families, and children.

The Idea of Austerity in British Politics, 2003–2013

“…The levels of association achieved with two dimensions in this article are comparable to other studies (see, for example, Schonhardt-Bailey, 2005;Schonhardt-Bailey et al, 2012). 2 As detailed in the methods sections, this study looks at explicit references to austerity, which raises the important question of whether the greater discussion of austerity on the left is indicative of the right employing an alternative euphemism.…”

Textual analysis of internal medicine residency personal statements: themes and gender differences

“…Linguistic analysis of the corpora was performed using two independent contextual analysis software programs, Alceste version 2012 enterprise (Image‐Zafar.com, Toulouse, France) and t‐lab version 9.0 (Franco Lancia, Frosinone, Italy). These programs are widely used for linguistic analysis in the social sciences . Both software applications analyse the corpus as a single document, systematically identifying elementary contextual units (ECUs) embedded in the corpus.…”

“…Recently, large‐scale textual analysis, made possible by advances in computational power and software development, has transformed the field of linguistic analysis. Software packages have been shown to effectively analyse textual data in the social science arenas of political science, psychology, sociology and economics . Such large‐scale data analyses are able to combine thousands of documents and generate reproducible findings and conclusions.…”

The interconnectedness of the economic content in the speeches of the US Presidents

“…Almost all the words reported in it and related to economics and finance are part of our glossary. The same can be said for the words used in Schonhardt-Bailey et al (2012) to identify economics related part of Reagan's speeches.…”