In my project, I am measuring the sentiment of Inaugural Speeches between Democrat and Republican President’s between the times of 1953 and 2009. I plan on doing so by using R Studio to look at the 10 most frequent words used in both parties separately along with the most recent President from their party. I will get the sentiment for those words by using the bing lexicon for text analysis. I will also make a word cloud for the 300 most frequent words from each party separately.

I hypothesize that the overall sentiment of the speeches will be positive because the speech is intended to empower people to trust their President. Along with this, I hypothesize that the Republican President’s speeches will have a sentiment that averages lower than Democrat President’s because our government is currently more left-leaning and currently has a democratic president.

Democrat President’s

## # A tibble: 10 x 3
##    word          n sentiment
##    <chr>     <int> <chr>    
##  1 freedom       9 positive 
##  2 liberty       7 positive 
##  3 peace         7 positive 
##  4 free          6 positive 
##  5 hard          6 negative 
##  6 courage       5 positive 
##  7 crisis        5 negative 
##  8 happiness     5 positive 
##  9 bless         4 positive 
## 10 promise       4 positive
## # A tibble: 10 x 3
##    word         n sentiment
##    <chr>    <int> <chr>    
##  1 freedom     18 positive 
##  2 promise     15 positive 
##  3 liberty     12 positive 
##  4 free        11 positive 
##  5 strong      10 positive 
##  6 peace        9 positive 
##  7 faith        8 positive 
##  8 powerful     8 positive 
##  9 courage      7 positive 
## 10 hard         7 negative

Through the word cloud, we can see the most frequent words via their size. Some words we expect like American, time, world, and power appear frequently throughout all the democratic speeches, however, if you look at the smaller words we can see more negative terms like ‘poor’, ‘afford’, ‘communism’, and ‘force’.

The sentiment of the 10 most used words in Obama’s Inaugural Speech overall is more negative than that of the 10 most used words of all the Democratic Presidents from 1953 to 2009. One variable that could explain this difference is the current events of when the speech was given. The crisis mentioned is referencing The Great Recession, one of the worst economic declines in US history. The purpose of Obama’s Inaugural Address is to present citizens with his vision for America. With this, the media’s pressuring the president to speak about the financial crisis could’ve influenced his word choice.

Though the overall sentiment of his 10 most frequent words is more negative than that of the Democratic President’s, his top 5 words are positive which is likely a trend for all other Presidents.

Republicans President’s

## # A tibble: 10 x 2
##    word          n
##    <chr>     <int>
##  1 freedom      32
##  2 america      31
##  3 nation       21
##  4 country      17
##  5 liberty      16
##  6 citizens     15
##  7 americans    13
##  8 time         11
##  9 world        11
## 10 history      10
## # A tibble: 10 x 3
##    word         n sentiment
##    <chr>    <int> <chr>    
##  1 freedom     80 positive 
##  2 free        48 positive 
##  3 peace       38 positive 
##  4 faith       25 positive 
##  5 liberty     22 positive 
##  6 love        17 positive 
##  7 dignity     15 positive 
##  8 progress    14 positive 
##  9 courage     12 positive 
## 10 strong      12 positive

The sentiment of the 10 most used words by George W. Bush is overall more negative than the other republican Presidents from 1953 to 2009 which can be explained by several different variables. During his term, George W. Bush was turned into a wartime President when the terrorist attack on the twin towers happened. A reason his speech could be of lower sentiment is Bush utilizing his speech to gain support for the war he declared within his term, and during a time with such tense air powerful words are necessary. To give a speech to support a war gives two strong opposite sentiments in its objective.

Though Obama’s speech is 8 years after Bush’s, when comparing George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s Inaugural Speeches, Obama’s has more negative values than Bush’s. This could be because one of the two Inaugural Speeches Bush gave was before his terms terrorist attack. Bush gave his Inaugural Speech in January while the terrorist attack happened in September. Another reason Obama’s speech is more negative in sentiment could be that only Obama’s first speech is included within the 1953 and 2009 filter. So while Bush had to address the September 11th in a later speech, Obama addressed the crisis in his first.

Both Parties

In Democrat and Republican Inaugural Addresses for this timeframe, some words can be expected to repeat, but from this, we can see almost all 10 of the most frequent words from both parties are repeated. These words encompass what America was built on and symbolize. Each President is tasked with making a speech to set the agenda for the next four years while maintaining as much support as possible so it’s a safe bet to reuse what past Presidents did. If we remove the 10 most frequent words from all Presidential speeches and look at the 20 most frequent words instead of 10, then the chances variability increases because the less frequent the word, the less likely it will be repeated.

## # A tibble: 10 x 2
##    word           n
##    <chr>      <int>
##  1 world        120
##  2 america      107
##  3 people       106
##  4 freedom       98
##  5 nation        94
##  6 time          82
##  7 government    69
##  8 free          59
##  9 americans     56
## 10 peace         47

When those words are removed, the differences in the speeches become prominent. Republican overall sentiment value for their most frequent words appear to be a lot more negative. Out of 20 words, Republicans had 11 registered by the lexicon as negative, meaning 55% of their 20 most frequent words beyond their first 10 are negative. The Democrats graph shows that 3 out of 20 or 15% of their words most frequent words beyond the first 20 are negative meaning 15%. This difference in sentiment could be caused by/used for things. As we saw with Bush and Obama’s speech, negative sentiment could be a result of national events during or around the time of their speech. And as we also saw with Bush and Obama, words with negative sentiment could be used to strike Americans with powerful words to gain support for a war or to tackle any crisis.

Conclusion

After looking at the words most used words in both parties’ speeches and the sentiment associated with them, there is enough evidence to conclude Republican Presidents show a more negative sentiment versus Democrat President’s Inaugural Speeches. Though this is true with the cumulative data, when looking at individual speeches the sentiment varies on a lower range. In both examples I chose, there was an occurrence of a national setback within their terms. Current issues with the President or before the President’s term could cause more infrequent words However many Presidents reuse words from past Presidents with positive sentiments.