Lincoln Speeches

As president, Abraham Lincoln endowed the American language with a vigor and moral energy that have all but disappeared from today’s public rhetoric. His words are testaments of our history, windows into his enigmatic personality, and resonant examples of the writer’s art. Renowned Lincoln and Civil War scholar Allen C. Guelzo brings together this volume of Lincoln Speeches that span the classic and obscure, the lyrical and historical, the inspirational and intellectual. The book contains everything from classic speeches that any citizen would recognize—the first debate with Stephen Douglas, the “House Divided” Speech, the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural Address—to the less known ones that professed Lincoln fans will come to enjoy and intellectuals and critics praise. These orations show the contours of the civic dilemmas Lincoln, and America itself, encountered: the slavery issue, state v. federal power, citizens and their duty, death and destruction, the coming of freedom, the meaning of the Constitution, and what it means to progress. [From the publisher]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/books/1070/thumbnail.jp

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 Bad Man and the Good Lawyer: A Centennial Essay on Holmes\u27s \u3ci\u3eThe Path of the Law\u3c/i\u3e

Although Justice Holmes did not much enjoy listening to speeches (he once wondered what makes the world throng to hear loose-fibred and coarse-grained men drool ), he had a remarkable gift for writing them. Holmes\u27s 1920 Collected Legal Papers includes a dozen speeches and addresses, all delivered to student audiences or lawyers\u27 associations, and there are unexpected pleasures to be found in every one. He had published all but four in a previous book of speeches, where he described them as chance utterances of faith and doubt.., for a few friends who will care to keep them. \u27 Among the four he omitted from his compendium of speeches are his only surviving full length addresses, Law in Science and Science in Law and The Path of the Law. These, Mark Howe observes, evidently seemed to Holmes to be something more significant than \u27chance utterances of faith and doubt. \u2

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.

Justice in Thucydides’ Athenian speeches

Speakers in Thucydides sometimes dismiss considerations of justice as irrelevant to decision-making in questions of international relations. It is argued that this line of argument is a distinctive characteristic of Thucydides’ Athenian speakers; and evidence from Athenian political oratory in the fourth and (so far as it is recoverable) late fifth centuries suggest that it is unlikely to have been characteristic in reality of Athenian speakers in the late fifth century. This conclusion poses a problem concerning Thucydides’ practice in his speeches to which there is no evident solution

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

Do Federal Reserve Presidents Communicate with a Regional Bias?

In this paper, we analyze the determinants of U.S. monetary policy stance as expressed in speeches by Federal Reserve (Fed) officials over the period January 1998 to September 2009. Econometrically, we use a probit model with regional and national macroeconomic variables to explain the content of these speeches. Our results are, first, that Fed governors and presidents follow a Taylor rule when expressing their opinions: a rise in inflation or the Leading Index makes a hawkish speech more likely. Second, when Fed presidents make a speech in their home district, its content is influenced by both regional and national macroeconomic variables, whereas speeches given outside the home district are influenced solely by national information. Third, the influence of regional variables increases during (i) Ben Bernanke’s tenure as Fed Chairman, (ii) recessions, and (iii) the financial crisis. Finally, speeches by nonvoting presidents reflect regional economic development to a greater extent than those by voting presidents.Central Bank Communication, Disagreement, Federal Reserve, Monetary Policy, Regional Representation, Speeches