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Contributed by Peter S. Bearman, June 30, 2015 (sent for review May 21, 2015; reviewed by Ronald L. Breiger and John Mohr)
Significance
A synoptic picture of the evolution of American politics is presented, based on analysis of the corpus of presidents’ State of the Union addresses, 1790–2014. The paper presents a strategy for automated text analysis that can identify meaningful categories in textual corpora that span long durées, where terms, concepts and language use changes, and evolution of topical structure is a priori unknown. Discourse streams identified as river networks reveal how change in contents masks continuity in the articulation of the major tasks of governance over US history.
Abstract
This study reveals that the entry into World War I in 1917 indexed the decisive transition to the modern period in American political consciousness, ushering in new objects of political discourse, a more rapid pace of change of those objects, and a fundamental reframing of the main tasks of governance. We develop a strategy for identifying meaningful categories in textual corpora that span long historic durées, where terms, concepts, and language use changes. Our approach is able to account for the fluidity of discursive categories over time, and to analyze their continuity by identifying the discursive stream as the object of interest.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: psb17{at}columbia.edu.
This contribution is part of the special series of Inaugural Articles by members of the National Academy of Sciences elected in 2014.
Author contributions: A.R. and P.S.B. designed research; A.R., J.-P.C., and P.S.B. performed research; J.-P.C. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; A.R., J.-P.C., and P.S.B. analyzed data; and A.R. and P.S.B. wrote the paper.
Reviewers: R.L.B., University of Arizona; and J.M., University of California, Santa Barbara.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1512221112/-/DCSupplemental.
Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.
State of the Union
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