Trumped-up vs. Clintonesque: what text analysis can teach us about the US elections
The 2016 United States presidential election—or in John Oliver’s most recent definition: ‘lice-on-a-rat-on-a-horse-corpse-on-fire-2016’—has reached its final leg. As a political scientist and a computational text analyst, I cannot resist sharing my two cents on an election that has certainly broken a model or two. Following in the footsteps of two colleagues who recently produced two excellent articles (you can read them here and here), in this post I’d like to analyse a few examples of the exceptional language used in this elections cycle. Text analysis can help us understand two commonly held beliefs or facts (the distinction has become a bit blurred over the course of this year’s election cycle) about the US elections: Donald Trump is running a negative …
Words that matter: What text analysis can tell us about the third presidential debate
The final Presidential debate of 2016 was as heated as the previous two—well demonstrated by the following name-calling exchange: CLINTON: …[Putin would] rather have a puppet as president of the United States. TRUMP: No puppet. No puppet. CLINTON: And it’s pretty clear… TRUMP: You’re the puppet! CLINTON: It’s pretty clear you won’t admit … TRUMP: No, you’re the puppet. It is easy to form our opinions of the debate and on the differences between the Presidential candidates on excerpts like this and memorable one-liners. But are small extracts representative of the debate as a whole? Moreover, how can we objectively analyse what was said, who got to say the most, and how the candidates differed in their responses? One approach is …
The Final Hundred Days: Conventions, Questions, and Conclusions
Fewer than 100 days. That is all that remains in what will, perhaps, go down as the most unpredictable American presidential election in at least a century. The candidates—Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump—are the two most disfavored and distrusted aspirants for the office ever nominated by a major American political party. And yet, here they stand. An article I wrote in March attempted to forecast how Hillary Clinton’s campaign would seek to ‘win the narrative game’ by defining the election as a choice between unity and division, love versus hate, hope over fear, and the like. By any objective comparison of the 2016 Republican and Democratic National Conventions, it seems that Mrs Clinton and the Democrats are well …
