American Presidency Project Research Articles

The syntactic position of the “people” in the political discourse of left and right populism (NLP-based syntactic analysis experience)

This paper attempts to measure populism in English-language speeches of politicians using computational linguistics methods. The relevance of this study is related not only to the rise of populism in the world and the importance of understanding the mechanisms of political discourse, but also to the lack of linguistic research in the context of corpus studies. Most of the methods proposed to date require significant resources or suffer from structural limitations, especially when they rely heavily on the human annotation process to analyze extensive corpus data. The material for the study was public speeches and interviews of right-wing populist politician and 45th President of the United States Donald Trump and political rhetoric of left-wing populist politician Senator Bernie Sanders. The corpus analysis was based on transcripts downloaded from The American Presidency Project and Miller Center websites. The syntactic position of key lexical units is determined using a comprehensive method based on dependency grammar combined with natural language processing (NLP) and van Leeuwen’s linguistic theory. The application of natural language processing methods confirms the assumption that the frequency of politicians’ reference to the people is not the only relevant indicator for measuring people-centrism in (populist) political discourse, as usually proposed in the political science literature. The results of the study indicate that there is no predominant role of the people in the discourse of Trump and Sanders. In most cases, the people appear in a complementary or adjunct position, indicating their secondary importance in their rhetoric. Given that populism implies proximity to the people and is positioned as “vox populi” – “the voice of the people”, it can be assumed that for both Trump and Sanders, addressing the people is only a way to achieve their political goals.

How America’s 18th and 19th Century Presidents Invoked Power

How did early presidents invoke power? Though existing works reveal incredible insights on the nature of presidential powers, most of those works focus on the so-called “modern presidency.” This article examines the issue of presidential power in the 18th and 19th centuries using the actual words of presidents themselves. We examine how these presidents referred to power in their Inaugural Addresses, Special Messages, Veto Messages, and Annual Messages. Analyzing textual data from the American Presidency Project focusing on Washington through McKinley, we find important variations in how presidents referred to power in presidential communications, across administrations, document type, and over time. Results indicate that these presidents were quite active in discussing a variety of policy areas. Our results add to our understanding of earlier presidents, as well as to the nature of presidential rhetoric and policymaking.

ЕКСТРАЛІНГВАЛЬНІ ОСОБЛИВОСТІ АМЕРИКАНСЬКОГО ПОЛІТИЧНОГО ДИСКУРСУ

American political discourse continues to arouse considerable interest among scholars of various disciplines, and constant emergence of new publications on this topic is a strong evidence for that. The prerequisite for such popularity to this type of speech activity is, on the one hand, the use of advanced communicative technologies of language nature, and, on the other hand, the outstanding personalities of the US politicians themselves. Undoubtedly, the main way to wage a political struggle with opponents for the favor of voters is to use various linguistic means: communicative strategies and tactics, stylistic devices, lexical units with pragmatic potential inherent at the semantic level, prosodic elements. However, when composing these elements in order to realize speakers’ communicative intentions, politicians and their speechwriters should take into account a number of extralinguistic factors historically formed by American society, which significantly affect the construction of political texts. The purpose of the article is to identify, describe and systematize such factors. The material for the analysis is the corpus of election speeches of the main candidates for the US presidency in 2020, Joe Biden and Donald Trump compiled from texts taken from the website The American Presidency Project. Speech processing, lexical items search, and access to context have been carried out using the corpus management software AntConc 3.4.4. In order to identify the relationship between extra-linguistic factors and the means of realizing their influence on the recipients, pragmatic and contextual analyzes of election speeches have been applied. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the identification and description of a complex of socio-cultural, historical and technological factors of a non-linguistic nature that influence the selection of tactics, topics and vocabulary of US political processes participants.

A Critical Discourse Analysis of Biden’s First Speech on the War in Ukraine from the Perspective of Ideological Square Model

This article analyses Biden’s first speech on the war in Ukraine. The aim is to reveal the underlying ideologies and messages communicated through it. The speech prescribed was taken from the official website of the American Presidency Project. Made up of 1984 words, the speech lasted for 13 minutes and 50 seconds. It was subjected to analysis from the perspective of van Dijk’s Ideological Square Model. The results show that Biden employed eight discursive strategies, which are Actor Description, Consensus, comparison, Evidentiality, Values expression, Victimization/criminalization, National self-glorification, and Presupposition. To legitimise his new severe sanctions on Russia, President Biden tried to export an image of himself and his allies as defenders of liberalism, humanitarianism and democracy against Russia and its president, who has initiated an ‘unnecessary’ war on Ukraine.

Transatlantic Shakedown: Does Presidential ‘Naming and Shaming’ Affect NATO Burden-Sharing?

Does “naming and shaming” of allies by US Presidents work? More precisely, does publicly criticizing members’ financial commitments to NATO increase allies’ defense spending and improve burden-sharing, or is it counterproductive, leading to lower contributions? We argue that the answer is likely neither. At best, excessive public shaming of allies is mere “cheap talk.” At worst, it is counterproductive. To evaluate this claim, we conducted textual analysis on all executive declarations, remarks, written statements, and media related to NATO members’ defense spending, all drawn from the American Presidency Project. We find provisionally that the more negatively US presidents speak about transatlantic burden-sharing, the less allies spend on defense. This finding addresses a gap in the current literature by analyzing the effectiveness of public “shaming” of allies in an attempt to redress burden-sharing problems endemic to alliances. Such actions do not appear to be effective, and may even be counterproductive.

From “Just Say No” to “I Didn’t Inhale” to We Have “Bigger Fish to Fry”: The President, The Media, and Attitudes Toward Marijuana Legalization

ABSTRACT Public opinion concerning marijuana legalization has varied greatly over time. While prior research suggests presidential drug rhetoric is related to public opinions on drugs, the relationship between the sitting president and attitudes specifically toward marijuana has not been explored. This study utilized data from the General Social Survey and the American Presidency Project to examine the relationship between the president and Americans’ attitudes toward marijuana legalization from 1975 through 2016. Findings indicate that confidence in the executive branch, fear of crime, and presidential drug rhetoric predict attitudes toward legalization despite controls for other factors such as estimated levels of marijuana use and arrests. These findings are discussed in the context of prior research that suggests presidential rhetoric, drug enforcement, and fear of crime may be related to American attitudes toward marijuana legalization.

Quantifying Attention to Foreign Elections with Text Analysis of U.S. Congress and the Presidency

We use web-scraping and text-analysis techniques to identify cases in which the U.S. government discussed democratization in other states, as well as considered or imposed foreign policy measures to affect liberalism abroad. We focus our search around periods surrounding foreign elections. Elections are important for democratization, and attract intense international scrutiny. We comb through more than 1.2 million documents contained in the Congressional Record and all congressional legislation, as well as the American Presidency Project. We utilize Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches to extract all instances related to our search. The documents we retrieve represent the first measure of attention by U.S. Congress and the President to democratization and electoral practices abroad. Our approach improves considerably the precision, coverage and granularity of existing data. Democratization has been a prominent U.S. foreign policy goal yet researchers have been hampered by lack of appropriate tools to study the topic. Our data can be used as is, or further processed, to relate U.S. policy commitments to policy outcomes. We provide some examples. We utilize a set of best practices that, together with the data and code we supply, can be used by scholars in a wide variety of settings, to collect information on any policy response by a bureaucratic entity.

The Contemporary Presidency: Do Presidential Memo Orders Substitute for Executive Orders? New Data

We describe and implement a text‐search strategy for reliably identifying, among published presidential documents, orders not titled “executive order” or “proclamation.” Given the inconsistent use of terms and titles in these documents, we refer to them with an umbrella term: “memo orders.” We identify over 1,600 memo orders in the archives of the American Presidency Project (APP) from 1977 to 2012. Drawing on the Federal Register for the same period, we find additional orders not in the APP archives. This produces a comprehensive estimate of the total number of published presidential orders from 1977 to 2012. We further apply our strategy to presidential signing statements from 1985 to 2008 and estimate that around 10% can be considered to include presidential orders.

The American Presidency Project

The American Presidency Project

Pre‐ and Post‐Welfare Reform Media Portrayals of Poverty in the United States: The Continuing Importance of Race and Ethnicity

This article analyzes racial and ethnic patterns in media coverage of poverty in the United States, with a particular focus on depictions of African Americans and Hispanics. A content analysis of photos accompanying poverty‐related stories published in Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report from 1992 to 2010 shows that while Hispanics are underrepresented in media portrayals of the poor, African Americans are overrepresented, especially alongside stories on welfare, in times of economic growth and low unemployment, and in coverage unsympathetic to the poor more generally. I conclude that media coverage of poverty is unrepresentative in a manner consistent with stereotypes concerning African Americans and Hispanics, likely contributing to the endurance of such stereotypes and explaining the fact that welfare is as unpopular after welfare reform as it was prior to reform.Related Articles Wagle, Udaya R. 2013. “.” Politics & Policy 41 (): 947‐984. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12053/abstract Agrawal, Shantanu. 2008. “.” Politics & Policy 36 (): 636‐675. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2008.00124.x/abstract Gainous, Jason, Stephen C. Craig, and Michael D. Martinez. 2008. “.” Politics & Policy 36 (): 972‐1004. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2008.00147.x/abstract Related Media Pilgrim, David. 2000. “.” http://www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/coon/ Clinton, William J. “, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=53219

The American Presidency Project

The American Presidency Project

A Case for Supreme Court Term Limits? The Changing Ideological Relationship between Appointing Presidents and Supreme Court Justices

The desirability of complete judicial independence has been debated in several recent works. At issue is whether democratic theory is compatible with policy making by the unelected U.S. Supreme Court justices, particularly as their service becomes further removed from the time when elected officials played a role in their appointment. We examine the relationship between appointing presidents and Supreme Court justices. Relying on ideal points that place all actors in the same scale, our regression models show that a justice will drift from the ideology of an appointing president with each additional term served, even after controlling for ideological shifts in political climate. The beginning of the eleventh term is when ideological drift becomes significant. The connection between justices and democratically elected officials begins to wane after this point in a justice's tenure—a finding that is likely to be germane for proponents of term limits for Supreme Court justices.Related Articles Sharma, Hemant, and John M. Scheb II. 2011. “.” Politics & Policy 39 (): 1077‐1105. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2011.00325.x/abstract Basabe‐Serrano, Santiago. 2012. “.” Politics & Policy 40 (): 339‐361. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2012.00348.x/abstract McCall, Madhavi. 2003. “.” Politics & Policy 31 (): 314‐343, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2003.tb00151.x/abstract Related MediaThe Judicial Common Space: http://epstein.usc.edu/research/JCS.html The American Presidency Project. 2013. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ Greene, Jamal. 2012. “.” . July 8. http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/07/08/another‐stab‐at‐the‐us‐constitution/revisiting‐the‐constitution‐we‐need‐term‐limits‐for‐federal‐judges

Importing Presidential Approval Poll Results

The American Presidency Project ( http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu ) provides presidential job approval poll results. These data are available for each U.S. president since President Franklin D. Roosevelt and for all the job approval polls conducted since his presidency. In this article, we propose the Stata command approval, which downloads these approval poll results in their original format, an HTML table. approval then parses the HTML table and prepares the data as a usable Stata dataset.

The Problem with Presidential Databases

There are many ways in which to study presidential communication from both humanistic and social scientific perspectives. From early study of presidential rhetoric (Aune and Medhurst 2008), to debates over rhetorical presidency (Ceaser et al. 1981; Tulis 1987; Medhurst 1996; Medhurst 2008), to generic studies of presidential oratory (Campbell and Jamieson 2008), to longitudinal studies of presidential style (Hart 1984, 1987), to content analysis of presidential discourse (Lim 2003, 2008), to examination of rhetoric's ability to affect public opinion (Edwards 2003), to constitutive function of rhetoric in formation of national identify (Beasley 2004; Stuckey 2004) scholarly attention to communicative dimensions of presidential leadership are ubiquitous. Into this plethora of scholarship step Coe and Neumann with a proposed database of what they label presidential speeches. Their work seems clearly to fall within a social scientific framework as they seek to standardize future analyses so that more meaningful generalizations can be made and more precise replications can be undertaken (Coe and Neumann 2011, 727). Insofar as standardization, generalization, and replication are hallmarks of standard social science, authors clearly seem to be on solid ground. But I wonder about rationale for a new database. only rationale that I see in their article is that proposed database will reduce absolute number of texts that scholars need to consult as they examine presidential rhetoric and that such a reduction and standardization will make generalizations easier to obtain. I do not doubt that such a claim is true. I do doubt its wisdom. First, there already exist at least two databases of presidential discourse--the Public Papers of Presidents of United States and American Presidency Project at University of California, Santa Barbara. Both of these databases have built-in search engines that allow for easy content-analytic searching. Coe and Neumann's database is, in fact, a subset of Public Papers. So only real advantage appears to be reduced amount of data (speeches) included in search domain. But is such a reduction really an advantage? If, for example, a scholar wanted to know what Jimmy Carter thought about Panama Canal Treaties, why would it be an advantage to search only nationally televised speech of February 1, 1978, when Carter gave several speeches on topic, at least one other of which was a address? It would not be an advantage. So if there is no advantage at level of individual president or particular issue, advantage must lie in institutional practice of rhetoric by presidency. But even at this level of analysis, kinds of payoffs envisioned--average word counts per speech, mean words per year, percentage of foreign policy versus percentage of domestic policy speaking--hardly seem worth candle. Worse, such analyses are almost always misleading. So I would like to see a stronger rationale, both in terms of need for a new database and in anticipated scholarly payoffs. Yet even if a stronger rationale could be provided, there are still several philosophical and methodological problems that must be addressed. Philosophical Concerns My concern starts with title of Coe and Neumann's article--The Major Addresses of Modern Presidents. Not or simply major addresses, or, better, selected addresses, but the addresses. One does not have to read very far to learn that the do not include some of most important in presidential history. So why insistence on the? Call me paranoid, but when rhetoricians see language deployed to define--to rope in or to rope out, as Kenneth Burke might say--we become suspicious. The addresses is a definition. Mutatis mutandis anything not included in database is not a presidential address. …

Importing Presidential Approval Poll Results

The American Presidency Project provides presidential job approval poll results. These data are available for each U.S. president since President Franklin D. Roosevelt and for all the job approval polls conducted. The proposed Stata command, approval, downloads these presidential approval poll results in its original format, an HTML table. The approval then parses the HTML table and prepares the data as a usable Stata dataset.

Phosphorus Paradox Scarcityand Overabundance of a Key Nutrient

In between shepherding the United States through the Great Depression and bracing the country for war in Europe, then-President Franklin Roosevelt took a moment in 1938 to tell Congress about phosphorus.1 More specifically, he spoke about phosphates, the most commonly commercially exploited form of phosphorus. Roosevelt’s was not a scientific presentation but a cautious alert about the critical role this element plays in agricultural production. Private interests were exporting increasing amounts of the country’s phosphates to markets abroad, he warned. Given the prospect that this vital constituent of fertilizer could come into short supply domestically, Roosevelt recommended framing a formal policy to deal with a strategic issue. “The disposition of our phosphate deposits should be regarded as a national concern,” he said. “The situation appears to offer an opportunity for this nation to exercise foresight in the use of a great national resource heretofore almost unknown in our plans for the development of the nation.”1 In spite of Roosevelt’s call, no phosphate policy was forthcoming. More than seven decades on, the phrase “heretofore almost unknown” still echoes in many discussions about phosphorus. Meanwhile, the significance of phosphates is even more profound today than it was in the 1930s. Phosphate rock has emerged as a globally traded commodity linked to a diverse set of politically charged debates, ranging from environmental degradation and threats to human health to food security and agricultural sovereignty.

Meeting the Challenge from Totalitarianism: The Tennessee Valley Authority as a Global Model for Liberal Development, 1933–1945

Meeting the Challenge from Totalitarianism: The Tennessee Valley Authority as a Global Model for Liberal Development, 1933–1945

The Limits of Audacity

The Limits of Audacity

Political Party Platforms

The theory of symbolic politics is used to examine the elements of criminal justice policy in political party platforms. It is hypothesized that political parties use their party platforms to make symbolic, rather than substantive, statements. Data were collected from the digital archives of both the American Presidency Project and the American Reference Library consisting of all political party platforms from 1868 to 2004. A content analysis of these party platforms, as they related to crime and justice issues, offers partial support for the claim that presidents and political parties use these party platforms primarily for evoking symbols.

The American Presidency Project

The American Presidency Project