{"title":"Staying on the democratic script? A deep learning analysis of the speechmaking of U.S. presidents","authors":"Amnon Cavari, Ákos Máté, Miklós Sebők","doi":"10.1111/psj.12534","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Dynamic agenda representation assumes a linkage between the policy emphases prescribed by various democratic inputs (electoral promises and public opinion polls) and policy agendas ranging from the media to executive orders. An extrapolation of this idea would propose that, in the U.S. context, policy emphasis in major programmatic messages such as State of the Union addresses would be followed by the president's day‐to‐day communication. We investigate this congruence with a new database of presidential speeches that, for the first time, offers a deep learning‐enhanced sentence‐level policy topic coding of various forms of the speeches U.S. presidents made from Truman to Trump (for a total count of 16,523 speeches divided into nearly 2 million individual sentences). Using this database, we demonstrate that presidents' occasional, day‐to‐day remarks strongly correlate with the annual policy messages—in this sense, presidents are staying on the democratic script.","PeriodicalId":48154,"journal":{"name":"Policy Studies Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.1000,"publicationDate":"2024-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Policy Studies Journal","FirstCategoryId":"91","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12534","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"POLITICAL SCIENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Dynamic agenda representation assumes a linkage between the policy emphases prescribed by various democratic inputs (electoral promises and public opinion polls) and policy agendas ranging from the media to executive orders. An extrapolation of this idea would propose that, in the U.S. context, policy emphasis in major programmatic messages such as State of the Union addresses would be followed by the president's day‐to‐day communication. We investigate this congruence with a new database of presidential speeches that, for the first time, offers a deep learning‐enhanced sentence‐level policy topic coding of various forms of the speeches U.S. presidents made from Truman to Trump (for a total count of 16,523 speeches divided into nearly 2 million individual sentences). Using this database, we demonstrate that presidents' occasional, day‐to‐day remarks strongly correlate with the annual policy messages—in this sense, presidents are staying on the democratic script.
期刊介绍:
As the principal outlet for the Public Policy Section of the American Political Science Association and for the Policy Studies Organization (PSO), the Policy Studies Journal (PSJ) is the premier channel for the publication of public policy research. PSJ is best characterized as an outlet for theoretically and empirically grounded research on policy process and policy analysis. More specifically, we aim to publish articles that advance public policy theory, explicitly articulate its methods of data collection and analysis, and provide clear descriptions of how their work advances the literature.