Comparing public communication in democracies and autocracies: automated text analyses of speeches by heads of government

Seraphine F. Maerz () and Carsten Q. Schneider
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Seraphine F. Maerz: Bard College
Carsten Q. Schneider: Central European University (CEU)

Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, 2020, vol. 54, issue 2, No 9, 517-545

Abstract: Abstract Renewed efforts at empirically distinguishing between different forms of political regimes leave out the cultural dimension. In this article, we demonstrate how modern computational tools can be used to fill this gap. We employ web-scraping techniques to generate a data set of speeches by heads of government in European democracies and autocratic regimes around the globe. Our data set includes 4740 speeches delivered between 1999 and 2019 by 40 political leaders of 27 countries. By scaling the results of a dictionary application, we show how, in comparative terms, liberal or illiberal the leaders present themselves to their national and international audience. In order to gauge whether our liberalness scale reveals meaningful distinctions, we perform a series of validity tests: criterion validity, qualitative hand-coding, unsupervised topic modeling, and network analysis. All tests suggest that our liberalness scale does capture meaningful differences between political regimes despite the large heterogeneity of our data.

Keywords: Political speeches of autocrats and democrats; Democratic backsliding; Qualities of democracy; Text-as-data; Dictionary; Topic models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11135-019-00885-7

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