Using Graph Theory Software for Political Discourse Analysis

Abstract

In this chapter, the authors show how, using graph theory, one can make a content analysis of political discourse. The premises of this analysis are: we have a corpus of speech of each party or candidate, as empirical data; speeches convey economic, political, and socio-cultural values, these taking the form of words or word families; there are interdependences between the values of a political discourse; they are given by the co-occurrence of two values, as words in the text, within a well-defined fragment or they are determined by the internal logic of political discourse; established links between values in a political speech have associated positive numbers indicating the “power” of those links; these “powers” are defined according to both the number of co-occurrences of values and the internal logic of the discourse where they occur. In this context, the authors highlight the following: a) the dominant values in a political speech; b) groups of values that have ties between them and have no connection with the rest; c) the order in which political values should be set in order to obtain an equivalent but more concise speech compared to the already given one; d) the links between the values that form the “core” political speech; and e) one can get from one value to another by using as few words as possible from the discourse to be analyzed.