Trump vs. Clinton: A Quantitative Analysis

This week I found an interesting analysis done for both Trump and Clinton during the first presidential debate. I thought I would focus on this analysis this week and think about other pathways I can take for my project. Next week, I believe I will start on the second presidential debate.

I mentioned a few weeks back that there was a program called the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) that essentially everyday language can be analyzed to reveal thoughts and feelings. It basically transcribes the words used, finds the percentage of total words used, and then analyzes them in a socio-psychological form.

Martin Krzywinski used LIWC to analyze each of the three presidential debates, and I'm here to talk about the first one. The analysis consists of quantitative evidence for Clinton and Trump’s respective word count, frequency, sentence size, parts of speech count/frequency, and parts of speech pairings (i.e. noun+verb).

To summarize the analysis:

• Trump dominated the debate in terms of time and total word count. He delivered 56% of the debate's words

• The fraction of stop words such as, "and", "of,” "in,” and etc. were similar between Clinton and Trump (~56-59%)

• Trump delivered 65.0% (708 sentences vs 429 sentences) more sentences

• Clinton repeated her nouns 24.0% less than Trump (2 vs 2.63) and her verbs 25.6% less (2.01 vs 2.7)

• Trump had a high repetition rate of adverbs, 56.3% higher than Clinton (3.94 vs 2.52)

With this analysis, it’s apparent that parts of speech is quite important with word usage. As I’ve mentioned repeatedly, Trump excessively used nouns and adverbs to emphasize his rhetoric. While last week showed that Trump may have used lower-level language and less sentence coherence, the real effect comes from the strong words that he used.

I’m a little interested to see why Trump’s words were a lot stronger than Clinton’s—why his emphatic words were more appealing or per say influential. I know that Clinton also used words that echoed “Justice,” “American,” and more. My advisor, Mr. Brady, suggested that I start contacting Republican representatives and schedule interviews with them. That way I can get real insight to Trump’s campaign and its overall effectiveness.

That is all for this week, and I’ll be attaching one of the graphics of the parts of speech analysis I summarized.

*credit to http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/debates2016/?