Election spin results covered by New Scientist

There’s an article on, among other things, my work on spin the US election campaign in this week’s issue of New Scientist. You can find it online here. There are also some interesting results from the people who look at facial expressions (pioneered by Ekman) and so voice analysis.

Update on spin in presidential elections

I was away for three weeks, and it’s taken me three weeks to catch up and be able to post again (although sporadically for a while).

I’ve worked through the candidate speeches since the beginning of the year. There’s  a lot to look at: what was the effect of Clinto dropping out of the race, and the transition to general-election mode?

Here’s the short version: Obama continues to use high levels of spin, after a brief period (between the time he had the primary won and the Pastor Wright affair) when his levels of spin were reduced. McCain has increased his level of spin so that it’s little different from that of Obama — his straight talk levels dropped off a cliff once Obama became the presumptive nominee.

Here’s the overall plot of spin:

Spin levels to July 16th

The red dots are McCain speeches; the blue dots, Clinton speeches; and the blue stars, Obama speeches. The speeches for each candidate are numbered in time order: 1-32 Clinton, 33-77 McCain, 78-128 Obama. Note that Clinton now looks like the straight-talking candidate, because the calculation of spin is done relative to all of the speeches over the past 7 months.

Here are the spin scores for each candidate individually, in time order:

Clinton Jan 2008 to her withdrawal

McCain Jan 2008 to July 16

Obama Jan 2008 to July 16th

The change in McCain’s levels of straight talking are by far the most noticeable. Obama has had a few flashes of straight talk, but he seems most comfortable using moderate levels of spin.

Of course, spin works and that is why both candidates are using it. But neither can really claim that their campaign is not politics as usual.

US presidential election spin — recent speeches

As promised, I’ve updated the plot of candidate spin to reflect only the speeches given in March.

The significance of this is that spin is always relative to some set of similar documents; and, in the Democratic campaign at least, the substance and tone of the conversation has changed substantially in the past few weeks. All candidates have moved away from presenting themselves as people to presenting their policies (McCain is back talking about himself, but this isn’t captured in this set of speeches).

9 is Obama’s race speech, 10 is his Iraq speech.

McCain still shows low levels of spin. However, the position of Obama and Clinton has largely reversed. Clinton shows high levels of spin, suggesting that her policy speeches are being simplified from the way she would usually speak (which is plausible). Obama continues to increase his level of first-person singular pronoun use, suggesting that he remains confident that he has won the nomination, despite the media’s attempts to keep stirring the pot.

U.S. versus Canadian political spin

I’ve gone back and done a little work analyzing the party leaders’ speeches in the Canadian federal election in 2006, comparing the language patterns to those of the current U.S. presidential contenders.

In the overall ranking of spin, 38 of the 50 Canadian speeches I’ve collected rank higher on spin than any of the U.S. speeches.

This probably doesn’t mean that Canadian politicians spin more than U.S. politicians, at least not directly. In general, the Canadian speeches have much shorter sentences and are shorter overall. This limits the opportunity to use exclusive words at all which, in turn, means that they can’t play much of a role in marking deception.

It may be that the Canadian electoral system, in which election campaigns are measured in weeks, rather than the gruelling years of American races, makes it easier for politicians to maintain a facade. It may also be that the Canadian media put less pressure on politicians.

It goes to show the importance of measuring spin (and deception) within a set of contextually appropriate texts. Failing to work out what the norms are in a particular domain can make a particular speech look particularly sincere or deceptive even when it is not.

Spin in the US Presidential Election

One of the places where I look for traces of bad guys is in the text they produce. An important aspect of this is detecting when someone is being deceptive.

It turns out that deception is signalled quite clearly by changes in the way a speaker uses function words, little words such as prepositions, auxiliary verbs and pronouns. Unfortunately, we as humans are not equipped with the ‘hardware’ to detect these changes, especially in real-time.

Deception covers a wide range from outright lying to socially acceptable forms such as white lies and negotiation. Political spin falls somewhere in the middle of this range — politicians want to reach out to as many voters as possible and they get tempted into saying things they don’t quite believe. Spin is one of those irregular verbs:

I inform my supporters

You spin

He panders

I’ve looked at the amount of spin in the speeches of the three current contenders in the US presidential election. There are substantial differences. The most important signals of the presence of spin are: low rates of first-person singular pronouns (I, me, my) and low rates of exclusive words, those words that introduce a modifying phrase or clause (or, but, however).

McCain’s characteristic style is heavy with ‘I’ and so we can conclude that he really is talking straight. His denial of the NYT story of his alleged relationship with a female lobbyist is entirely convincing because of his word use when he talked about it at the press conference.

Clinton’s spin is also low, mostly because she uses large numbers of exclusive words — wonkishness coming through. She, also, is presenting more or less the real person she is.

Obama, on the other hand, shows all the signs of high levels of spin. I’m not saying that this is deliberate; but it does seem that he is presenting a facade that is not who he really is, at least to a greater extent than McCain and Clinton.

Obama’s speeches depend, for their success, on his delivery. If you read the text of his speeches, they are quite dry. If he did not use the pronoun ‘we’ so often, they would seem even drier.

His use of ‘we’ is interesting. This pronoun is often thought of, intuitively, as conveying a kind of inclusiveness. When women use it, this is often the case. However, when men use it, it is often as a velvet glove to cover an iron fist. In other words, men tend to use it as a distancing mechanism.

Why is Obama so successful? Because he is, at some level, telling people what they want to hear. This is a risky strategy. We don’t have a lot of history to go by, but it seems as if the candidate who spins the least tends to win elections. It also seems that the candidate who uses first-person singular pronouns more than first-person plural pronouns also tends to win — because this conveys greater optimism, likeability, and humility.
Here are some of the results of my analysis of recent speeches