With the US Political Convention season in full swing, we thought we’d present a short demonstration of how Nexalogy’s blogosphere analysis can shed light on the discourse related to political campaigns, candidates, and issues. In mid-July, we performed an analysis of the English blogosphere related to the upcoming US Presidential election. We focused specifically on Free Trade and NAFTA, which became a key issue during Primary season.
The following map was generated using a dataset including all blog posts (there were 946 total posts after filtering for spam) for a structured series of queries between July 14 and July 18. We then performed a lexical analysis that identified and mapped the relationship between the top 150 words in the dataset.
- Obama – McCain – NAFTA
Observations
- McCain and Obama are both located at the center of the map – which is to be expected, since these were used as keywords to establish the dataset. All of the words on the map are arranged by their relationship to their nearest 5 other nodes (words), and the relative size of each node is directly proportional to its resonance in the dataset.
- When performing such an analysis, words that appear on the map tend to self-organize into clusters that define concepts that are important. In this case, there were 6 significant conceptual clusters related to important events of that week: Gov. Mark Sanford’s gaffe in an interview on CNN; Michigan speeches by both Obama and McCain; McCain’s speech at the La Raza Convention; issues related to free trade and trade agreements; the “flip-flop” question, and general political and social issues that are at play during the election season.
- In terms of positives for McCain during that week, the strong cluster related to his speech at La Raza is particularly interesting. In this speech, McCain was quoted as saying that he’s an “unapologetic supporter” of free trade. “Unapologetic” and “supporter” are the words which connected this cluster with the general free trade cluster to its left (and this connection is largely responsible for their proximity on the map). That is not to say that this declaration is the only thing in play for McCain on this issue – as we read the blog posts that make up the free trade cluster, we noticed that the controversy surrounding McCain’s trip to Ottawa in June was still very evident in the text.
- The other negative cluster related to McCain was related to Sanford’s inability to distinguish specific ways that McCain’s economic policy proposals differed from those of Bush in an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN. One of the important innovations of this kind of lexical analysis is that it allows us to identify which stories resonate the most in a given period of time, and the fact that a single story related to a single on-air interview by a McCain surrogate even appears on this graph demonstrates the influence that even a small problem can have once it’s picked up in the blogs.
- It’s also interesting to note the other individuals who appear among the top 150 words on the map. Other than Obama and McCain, we also see the following people: Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Phil Gramm, Austan Goolsbee, and Sanford.
- Gramm, the former McCain Campaign co-chair, was in the news due to his assertion that America had “become a nation of whiners” following which he resigned his position in the campaign. His name is directly connected to the words “nation,” “political,” “economic,” and “advisor.”
- Austan Goolsbee is Obama’s key economic advisor and appears because he is widely cited by bloggers that take a close look at Obama’s economic and trade policies.
- The fact that both Clintons appear among the top 150 words in the map is an indication of the importance they still wield related to this year’s election cycle.
- The last cluster to note is related to the “flip-flop” question. This is a relatively small cluster but contains words directly related to Obama including “fisa” and “public finance.” At the time of this analysis, this question was still very much alive.
As the election draws closer we’ll perform at least one additional analysis of this kind that will allow us to see how these issues have developed since mid-July. Feel free to ask questions or note any additional trends in the comments.
