The First 100 Days: A Corpus Of Political Agendas on Twitter

The First 100 Days: A Corpus Of Political Agendas on Twitter Nathan Green, Septina Larasati Marymount University, Charles University Arlington Virginia, Prague Czech Republic ngreen@marymount.com, septina.larasati@gmail.com Abstract The first 100 days corpus is a curated corpus of the first 100 days of the United States of America’s President and the Senate. During the first 100 days, the political parties in the USA try to push their agendas for the upcoming year under the new President. As communication has changed this is primarily being done on Twitter so that the President and Senators can communicate directly with their constituents. We analyzed the current President along with 100 Senators ranging the political spectrum to see the differences in their language usage. The creation of this corpus is intended to help Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Political Science research studying the changing political climate during a shift in power through language. To help accomplish this, the corpus is harvested and normalized in multiple formats. As well, we include gold standard part-of-speech tags for selected individuals including the President. Through analysis of the text, a clear distinction between political parties can be found. This analysis shows the important item of their political agendas during the first 100 days of a new party in power. Keywords: corpus construction, politics, social media 1. Introduction Political communication in the United States has changed dramatically over recent years. Gone are the fireside chats on the radio, open press conferences on television are be- coming less frequent. The current form of communication of politicians to their constituents and to other politicians is Twitter (Conway et al., 2015; Perlmutter, 2008). A new ad- ministration’s public agenda would have once been in the purview of the media but now it is in more control of the campaign using new media such as Twitter (L. Towner and Dulio, 2012). While we will examine the 2017 USA gov- ernment, this same phenomenon has been shown in other countries as well during recent elections (Dang-Xuan et al., 2013) 2. Background Studying politics and political power shifts has been a diffi- cult problem due to limited resources (Menini and Tonelli, 2016) and lack of examples during the age of social media. Shifts in political ideology tend to happen over longer peri- ods of time. In the last United States election, the executive branch (President) switched from a Democratic President to a Republican administration. This is considered a switch from the political left to the political right. Two years prior in 2015 the United States’ Senate switch in the same direc- tion. This was the first time since 2009 that all branches of government were under the same party’s power when all branches were run by the Democratic party. The previous time this had happened for Republicans was in 2003, the first election after the 9/11 terror attacks and before that we would have to go all the way back to 1953. Given these long gaps, this is the first time we can examine their ability …

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