U.S. Presidential Leadership and Crisis Rhetoric

My capstone project seeks to determine what are U.S. presidents attempting to accomplish in (or with) their speeches? This matters because presidential responses to crises can reflect how a president’s leadership abilities are perceived by the people he serves. This perception plays a large role in determining how much political strength the president has to accomplish his agenda. I address this research question by analyzing four different speeches: President Kennedy’s Address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy’s Address on the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Bush’s National Cathedral Speech after the September 11th attacks and President Bush’s speech in Jackson Square after Hurricane Katrina. I seek to determine whether or not these speeches are considered either “successes” or “failures” based off of public approval ratings and polls provided by sources such as Gallup. I analyzed factors such as the tone and political context of the speeches to explore why the presidents are using specific rhetorical strategies. My argument is that, although approval ratings matters in determining public approval, other factors, such as political context and the location of the speeches, also play a role in determining how people view the success of the president’s address and overall handling of the crisis. In addition, I also would like to acknowledge that the speeches will not directly cause a “solution” to the crisis. The purpose of my study is to examine whether the president was able to accomplish his goals in his speeches given during the crisis. I believe that the political context in particular will play a large role in explaining the president’s goals and a specific agenda for their given speeches. While there are various ways in which success and failure can be measured, this project does so by looking at public approval ratings after the speeches

The Rhetorical Implications of Clementia in Cicero’s Caesarian Speeches

Cicero’s Caesarian speeches were delivered in 46-45 B.C. to Caesar after his victories in the Civil War. Caesar faced a number of critical issues as he dealt with the political and social aftermath of the years after 49 B.C., including what to do with the supporters of his enemies. Cicero, preeminent orator and a key political, was well-placed to speak on behalf of these individuals. Clementia, as an intrinsic theme, impinges upon social, political, and linguistic spheres and became a nexus for anxieties and manipulation between the senatorial and plebian orders. This research compares and contrasts the understanding, presentation, and use of clementia in these speeches, in a discussion set within the social, political, and linguistic contexts that lend this word its powerful significance. It is clear that clementia becomes a point of negotiation of power for Caesar and Cicero alike, the one asserting his political dominance, the other speaking as the social conscience of Rome

IGGSA Shared Tasks on German Sentiment Analysis (GESTALT)

We present the German Sentiment Analysis Shared Task (GESTALT) which consists of two main tasks: Source, Subjective Expression and Target Extraction from Political Speeches (STEPS) and Subjective Phrase and Aspect Extraction from Product Reviews (StAR). Both tasks focused on fine-grained sentiment analysis, extracting aspects and targets with their associated subjective expressions in the German language. STEPS focused on political discussions from a corpus of speeches in the Swiss parliament. StAR fostered the analysis of product reviews as they are available from the website Amazon.de. Each shared task led to one participating submission, providing baselines for future editions of this task and highlighting specific challenges. The shared task homepage can be found at https://sites.google.com/site/iggsasharedtask/

WOULD YOU TRUST AN ITALIAN POLITICIAN? PRELIMINARY EVIDENCE FROM ITALIAN REGIONAL POLITICS

This paper evaluates the erosion of electoral accountability of the "Governors" of the Italian Regions in three subsequent political moments: 1) the elections; 2) the inaugural speeches of the Governor; 3) their first important policy decision, the long-term regional budget (DPEFR). We use content analysis (Laver et al., 2003) to assess the position of each Governor on a left to right distribution at the moment of the inaugural speeches and of the DPEFR. We then analyze the correlation between the distributions of 1) the electoral results and the inaugural speeches and 2) the inaugural speeches and the DPEFR, under the hypothesis that greater similarity can be interpreted as greater accountability. The analysis detects some erosion of accountability from the elections to the inaugural speeches, and a more serious one from the inaugural speeches to the DPEFR. A series of ANOVA tests suggests that the Region's relative economic position/dependency on transfers from the central governments partly explains such loss of accountability.

Detecting Policy Preferences and Dynamics in the UN General Debate with Neural Word Embeddings

Foreign policy analysis has been struggling to find ways to measure policy preferences and paradigm shifts in international political systems. This paper presents a novel, potential solution to this challenge, through the application of a neural word embedding (Word2vec) model on a dataset featuring speeches by heads of state or government in the United Nations General Debate. The paper provides three key contributions based on the output of the Word2vec model. First, it presents a set of policy attention indices, synthesizing the semantic proximity of political speeches to specific policy themes. Second, it introduces country-specific semantic centrality indices, based on topological analyses of countries' semantic positions with respect to each other. Third, it tests the hypothesis that there exists a statistical relation between the semantic content of political speeches and UN voting behavior, falsifying it and suggesting that political speeches contain information of different nature then the one behind voting outcomes. The paper concludes with a discussion of the practical use of its results and consequences for foreign policy analysis, public accountability, and transparency

Ways of Forgetting and Remembering the Eloquence of the 19th Century: Editors of Romanian Political Speeches

The paper presents a critical evaluation of the existing anthologies of Romanian oratory and analyzes the pertinence of a new research line: how to trace back the foundations of Romanian versatile political memory, both from a lexical and from an ideological point of view. As I argue in the first part of the paper, collecting and editing the great speeches of Romanian orators seems crucial for today’s understanding of politics (politicians’ speaking/ actions as well as voters’ behavior/ electoral habits). In the second part, I focus on the particularities generated by a dramatic change of media support (in the context of Romania’s high rates of illiteracy at the end of the 19th century): from “writing” information on the slippery surface of memory (declaimed political texts such as “proclamations,” “petitions,” and “appeals”) to “writing” as such (transcribed political speeches). The last part of the paper problematizes the making of a new canon of Romanian eloquence as well as the opportunity of a new assemblage of oratorical texts, illustrative for the 19th century politics, and endeavors to settle a series of virtual editing principle

Audience Responses and the Context of Political Speeches

Previous studies showed that cultural dimensions (individualism and collectivism) are related to audience behavior in responding to political speeches. However, this study suggests that speech context is an important issue to be considered in understanding speaker-audience interaction in political speeches. Forms of response, audience behavior, and response rates were analyzed in three speech contexts: acceptance speeches to nomination as political parties’ candidates for presidential election, presidential election campaign speeches, and presidential inauguration speeches in the Korean presidential election of 2012. We found that audience response forms and behavior were distinctive according to the three speech contexts: in-group partisan leadership, competitive, and formal contexts. However, there was no relationship between the affiliative response rate and electoral success in the election. The function of the audience response is popularity and support of a speaker in acceptance and election campaign speeches, while it is conformity to social norms in inauguration speeches

A new Database of Parliamentary Debates in Ireland, 1922--2008

We present a new database of parliamentary debates and written answers in Dáil Éireann for the entire time period from the third Dáil in 1922 to the thirtieth Dáil in 2008. This database was built from the Official Records of the Houses of the Oireachtas. Unlike its original version, our database integrates information about debates and information about deputies into a single database. This database therefore allows to search and retrieve contributions from individual deputies of the Dáil (Teachta Dála or TD) and to combine information about TDs' parties and constituencies with the history of political speeches and written answers. In addition, our database facilitates the application of content analysis software such as Wordscore (Laver, Benoit and Garry, 2003) or Wordfish (Slapin and Proksch, 2008) and makes it possible to estimate TDs' policy preferences from speeches. In this paper we document the structure of the database and how it was generated. We furthermore demonstrate how political debates can be used in social science research through a series of examples. These include an analysis of the policy agenda in all budget speeches from 1922 to today, the estimation of speakers' policy positions in the 2008 budget debate, and the estimation of ministers' policy positions in the 26th government in 2002.parliamentary debates, policy point estimation, budget speeches, text analysis