Lexical shifts, substantive changes, and continuity in State of the Union discourse, 1790–2014 - Historical Part

The annual State of the Union address (hereafter, SoU), in which the US president reports broadly on the progress and challenges of his administration.

The SoU address is delivered annually by the president to a joint session of Congress, a tradition with its basis in the US Constitution, where it is mandated that the president “shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the SoU, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”

“The message includes a budget message and an economic report of the nation, and also allows the President to propose their outlined legislative agenda (for which the cooperation of Congress is needed) and national priorities.”

After 1913, Woodrow Wilson, the 28th U.S. President, began the regular practice of delivering the address to Congress in person as a way to rally support for his agenda. With the advent of radio and television, the address is now broadcast live across the country on many networks.

Wiki

Research attests to the SoU’s significance in political agenda setting and the reciprocal influence of public opinion on the content of the address. The SoU reflects opinion regarding the salience of issues, while also creating it:

• Cohen JE (1995) Presidential rhetoric and the public agenda.

• Hill KQ (1998) The policy agendas of the president and the mass public: A research validation and extension.

• Edwards GC, Wood BD (1999) Who influences whom? The President, Congress, and the media.

Constructing importance

Thanks both to its persistence and its prominence as an institution in US national politics, the SoU has been of perennial interest to researchers seeking to understand various facets of the country’s history:

• Zarefsky D (2008) Strategic maneuvering in political argumentation.

• Bimes T, Mulroy Q (2004) The rise and decline of presidential populism.

• Lazar A, Lazar MM (2004) The discourse of the new world order: Out-casting the double face of threat.

• Teten RL (2003) Evolution of the modern rhetorical presidency: Presidential presentation and development of the State of the Union address.

• Laracey M (2009) The rhetorical presidency today: How does it stand up?

The main focus of this work has been to pinpoint changes in political discourse to the influence of particular presidents and thus stands in contrast to the focus of this article, which is to represent continuity and change in the structure and content of American social and political thought.

idea that words acquire meaning through their relations with other words:

• focus on co-occurrence, extracting the local ties between terms in paragraphs to induce categories of discourse from the resulting network structure

• approximate the semantic standpoint of contemporary observers

• We thus consider the categorical structure of discourse over successive, delimited time periods to uncover and analyze continuity and change in social and political thought

• Clarifying these methodological points and identifying the insights into American social and political discourse that they permit is the focus of this article