Results

This website provides (somewhat) interactive visualization of the results of the CLIP model as described in the paper

Measuring Ideological Proportions in Political Speeches. [pdf | appendix] Yanchuan Sim, Brice Acree, Justin H. Gross, Noah A. Smith. In Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2013). Oct, 2013. Seattle, WA.

Preamble

In the paper, we described a two stage process where we

  1. seek to extract a set of cue lexicons from a collection of contemporary political writings whose authors are perceived as representative of one particular ideology (stage 1), and
  2. infer, for each candidate, their ideological proportions at different stages of the election campaign (stage 2).

Stage 1: Cue lexicon

In stage 1, we automatically identified a set of 8483 cue terms.

Ideology No. of cue terms Found in speech corpus
Left 2580 2106 (81.6%)
Far Left 2802 1806 (64.5%)
Center-Left 3050 2183 (71.6%)
Progressive (L) 2319 1922 (82.9%)
Religious (L) 941 684 (72.7%)
Center 1230 959 (78.0%)
Right 2415 1931 (80.0%)
Far Right 2410 1834 (76.1%)
Libertarian (R) 2268 1723 (76.0%)
Center-Right 1450 1175 (81.0%)
Populist (R) 1155 889 (77.0%)
Religious (R) 960 695 (72.4%)
Overall 8483 4995 (58.9%)

Stage 2: Ideological proportions

Candidate left-right scatter plot

Elections

Election No. of speeches Avg speech length Avg no. of cue terms Avg lag
2008 Primary 359 3022 88.9 2794
2008 General 209 2685 94.5 2462
2008-2011 13 2940 90.8 2702
2012 Primary 80 2430 78.9 2230
2012 General 118 3953 125.2 3602
Total 779 3010 94.9 2768

Candidates

Below is a list of candidates whose speeches we ran the CLIP model on. Click on the candidate's name to see details of his ideological proportions.

Candidate Affilation No. of speeches Avg speech length Avg no. of cue terms Avg lag
Joe Biden Democrat 6 2543 73.3 2346
Hillary Clinton Democrat 105 3759 114.1 3477
John Edwards Democrat 27 3072 97.0 2832
Bill Richardson Democrat 29 3050 111.0 2776
Barack Obama Democrat 258 3450 113.4 3163
Rudy Giuliani Republican 36 1863 46.7 1724
Mike Huckabee Republican 14 2556 50.9 2388
John McCain Republican 169 2542 79.5 2338
Fred Thompson Republican 15 2683 66.5 2495
Mitt Romney Republican 59 2551 81.0 2332
Michele Bachmann Republican 6 2259 92.3 2069
Herman Cain Republican 2 2992 53.0 2760
Newt Gingrich Republican 15 3163 112.9 2913
Jon Huntsman Republican 5 1899 66.6 1725
Ron Paul Republican 7 2439 61.3 2257
Rick Perry Republican 10 1772 73.8 1613
Rick Santorum Republican 16 2457 60.7 2281
Total - 779 3010 94.9 2768