Content Analysis of Political Speeches

Content analysis of political speeches turns the public words of foreign-policy actors — leaders' addresses, UN General Assembly statements, parliamentary debates, press briefings — into systematic, comparable measures. Spanning classic human-coded content analysis and modern text-as-data methods surveyed by Grimmer and Stewart (2013), it lets researchers quantify what leaders say: their threat perceptions, hostility, cooperative or conflictual orientation, issue priorities, and rhetorical positions, so that rhetoric can be tracked over time, compared across actors, and related to behavior.