IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/aei/journl/y2016id882015.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The candidates in their own words: A textual analysis of 2016 president primary debates

Author

Listed:
  • Weifeng Zhong

Abstract

In the 2016 election cycle, the two major parties held 20 primary debates, and the candidates spoke hundreds of thousands of words. In this paper, I turn them into "word data" and examine three characteristics of the candidates: (1) Where do the candidates stand on a spectrum of policy positions? (2) How negative are the candidates' political sentiments? (3) How effectively do the candidates' speeches deliver content? This word-data approach makes possible observations that are difficult to discover with conventional methods. For example, I find the political speeches of both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump appear moderate in policy positions, positive in political sentiments, and effective in delivering content.

Suggested Citation

  • Weifeng Zhong, 2016. "The candidates in their own words: A textual analysis of 2016 president primary debates," AEI Economic Perspectives, American Enterprise Institute, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:aei:journl:y:2016:id:882015
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.aei.org/publication/the-candidates-in-their-own-words-a-textual-analysis-of-2016-president-primary-debates
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. J. Eric Oliver & Wendy M. Rahn, 2016. "Rise of the Trumpenvolk," The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, , vol. 667(1), pages 189-206, September.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:aei:journl:y:2016:id:882015. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Dave Adams, CIO (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aeiiius.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.