Deteriorating Democracy: Temporal Horizons in the U.S. Presidents’ Speeches

• In Event: Presidents and Executive Politics & Public Policy Virtual Poster Session
  In Virtual Poster Session: Presidents and Executive Politics Virtual Poster Session

Abstract

Time, being a scarce and nonrenewable resource for the elected politicians on the one hand, is an integral part of their political strategies on the other.　Temporal aspect of the political text alongside with the semantic units performs an important role of political mobilization and conveys an author’s attitude towards reality and particular aspects of it. With the widespread use of computer text processing in political science more and more elaborate topic models appear every year, but none of them ponder on the fact that for most subjects in political communication to be spoken in the present, past, or future tense context makes a significant difference. Although there is a number of theoretical studies on the temporal perspectives of democracy, in applied text analysis the focus on representation of its temporal aspect is steadily missing.
Using verbal time operators in NLTK based Python design with sentence tokenization, the author devised a system of recognition for the 12 tenses of the English language. The data set consists of 1012 the US presidents’ speeches from 30.04.1789 to 08.08.2020. The analysis seeks to state, first, the general tendency in the formulation of the horizons of the past, present and future; second, to estimate correlation of tense occurrences for the 38 presidents, who were in office 4 or more years, and to check whether or not correlation of occurrences corresponds with the known periodicity trends (e.g., creedal passion periods); third, to scrutinize the relation between correlation of tense occurrences and party affiliation of the presidents; forth, to state the tense context for such lexemes as “democracy” and “democratic” and find out tendency in its usage for 230-year span.
The findings indicated a strong tendency towards the decrease of the future tense usage in whole, and estimated the highest correlation of the tense structure of the re-elected Democratic Party presidents’ speeches with that of the first four presidents. However, the time series analysis stated a periodicity trend different from the creedal passion cycles (see Attachment 1). Data of tense distribution for the lexemes of “democracy”/”democratic” demonstrate a meaningful trend of the sharp decline of the future tense and vivid raise of the past tense usage, which elucidates the fact that the democratic rhetoric in the American presidents’ speeches becomes more and more reference from the past, but not the landmark for the future achievements.


Attachment 1: Relevant periods of reference for presidencies

I. Washington, Adams (1789-1801) vs:
1. Jackson, van Buren, Tyler (1829-1845)
2. Roosevelt, Truman (1933-1953)
3. Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan (1969-1989)

II. Monroe, J.Q.Adams, Jackson (1817-1837) vs Lincoln, A.Johnson, Grant (1861-1877)

III.Van Buren, Tyler, Polk (1837-1849) vs:

1. McKinley-Truman (1837-1953)
2. Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan (1969-1989)

IV. Taft-Eisenhower (1909-1961) vs Eisenhower-Reagan (1953-1989)

V. Self-referential period of Taft-Truman (1909-1953)

Author

• Olesya Sheblo, Gakushuin University