Quantifying the Uniqueness and Divisiveness of Presidential Discourse
This work addresses the problem of analyzing political discourse for researchers and policymakers, providing tools to assess uniqueness and divisiveness, though it is incremental in applying new metrics to existing data.
The paper tackled the problem of quantifying distinctiveness and divisiveness in presidential speech by introducing a novel metric based on large language models and a new lexicon for divisive speech, finding that Donald Trump's speech patterns are significantly more unique and divisive than those of other recent major party nominees, with differences holding across various measurement strategies and contexts.
Do American presidents speak discernibly different from each other? If so, in what ways? And are these differences confined to any single medium of communication? To investigate these questions, this paper introduces a novel metric of uniqueness based on large language models, develops a new lexicon for divisive speech, and presents a framework for assessing the distinctive ways in which presidents speak about their political opponents. Applying these tools to a variety of corpora of presidential speeches, we find considerable evidence that Donald Trump's speech patterns diverge from those of all major party nominees for the presidency in recent history. Trump is significantly more distinctive than his fellow Republicans, whose uniqueness values appear closer to those of the Democrats. Contributing to these differences is Trump's employment of divisive and antagonistic language, particularly when targeting his political opponents. These differences hold across a variety of measurement strategies, arise on both the campaign trail and in official presidential addresses, and do not appear to be an artifact of secular changes in presidential communications.