Quantifying the language of British politics, 1880-1910

Abstract

Historians – influenced by the ‘linguistic turn’ – currently study political language almost exclusively qualitatively, through sharply focused case studies. This approach has many strengths but has limited power to examine national long-term political change over such vast discourses as general election campaigns. This article contends that electronic quantitative text analysis methods (inspired by corpus linguistics) could potentially reshape historians' understanding of the language of British electoral politics by providing a powerful ability holistically to assess the typicality, scope and power of key issues, ideologies, personalities and ideas across huge texts. It presents three supporting case studies – on Irish Home Rule, imperialism and William Gladstone – where a multi-million word ‘corpus’ of election speeches from this period is interrogated by computer.