Political Metaphors in U.S. Governor Speeches
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Date
2022-12
Publication Type
Working Paper
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yes
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Abstract
How do politicians use metaphors in their speeches? To provide evidence on this question, we apply a deep-learning-based metaphor detection model to a historical corpus of annual State of the State speeches given by U.S. governors, ranging from 1995 to 2022. Across 9 socio-economic topics, we present the following descriptive fi ndings. First, metaphors are most commonly used on fi scal and economic issues. Second, Democratic governors employ more metaphors on environmental issues relative to Republican governors, who in turn express more metaphors on moral values. Third, we con firm that the language used to express political metaphors is emotionally charged, with a degree of heterogeneity. Our emotion scores increase the most in presence of a metaphor on subjects related to the economy, fiscal issues, and moral values.
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published
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Journal / series
Volume
13/2022
Pages / Article No.
Publisher
ETH Zurich, Center for Law & Economics
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Subject
NLP; Political language; Deep learning; US politics; Metaphors
Organisational unit
09627 - Ash, Elliott / Ash, Elliott