Hillary Clinton's Career in Speeches

Welcome to the project website for the book

Hillary Clinton’s Career in Speeches: The Promises and the Perils of Women’s Rhetorical Adaptivity

by Shawn J. Parry-Giles, David Kaufer, and Xizhen Cai

In the book, we describe and analyze the rhetorical behavior (speeches) of Hillary Clinton across her public career (1993-2016) and make head-to-head comparisons between the speeches Clinton delivered on her two presidential runs and the three presidential campaign opponents (Obama [2007-2008], Sanders [2015-2016], and Trump [2016]) she faced during those runs. The book ends with a comparison between Hillary Clinton’s primary speeches in 2008 and 2016 and the primary speeches of the four woman senators who vied for the Democratic nomination in 2020.

This website includes some preliminary background information, visualizations of the data, and analytical results from the statistical and close reading methods we employed.

Introduction

The data we analyzed are from Hillary Clinton's speeches across her public career. We convert the English text of her speeches to numeric data using the natural language processing tool DocuScope. The data consist of the relative frequency (per 1000 words) of twenty-eight DocuScope language variables using a dictionary specifically developed for this corpus of texts.

Using the statistical method Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and statistically-guided close reading, we constructed six rhetorical profiles. Please consult the page Methods to Obtain Rhetorical Profiles for a brief discussion of the methods we used to derive six rhetorical profiles (including one hybrid profile) from each individual PCA analysis. We use the notion of rhetorical profile throughout the book to describe and analyze Hillary Clinton's rhetorical behavior, the behaviors of her three male opponents, and those of the Democratic women who ran for the presidency in 2020 in the wake of her 2016 defeat to Donald Trump.

Rhetorical Profiles

The book describes five studies we undertook that varied by the corpora we analyzed. In study one, we compared Clinton's speeches across her three governing roles, as first lady, senator, and secretary of state. We then looked to see how she used or adapted these career profiles in her head to head races against Obama (study two), Sanders (study three), and Trump (study four). In study five, we looked for a possible “gender effect” by comparing Clinton’s speeches in her primaries against Obama and Sanders with the primary speeches of Democratic women who ran in the 2020 presidential campaign. We also ran three supplemental studies (six to eight) that provided important background for the five studies we report in the book. In study six, we compared the speeches Clinton delivered in her three governing roles (first lady, senator, secretary of state) to the speeches she delivered campaigning for the presidency. In study seven, we compared Clinton's campaign speeches to the pooled speeches of her three presidential opponents (Obama, Sanders, Trump). In study eight, we compared the speeches she delivered running against Obama, the speeches she delivered against Sanders, and the speeches she delivered against Trump.

In each study, we identify the profiles derived from each principal component. Rhetorical profiles consist of core and non-core variables. Core variables define the profile across all speech contexts and every profile is represented by the presence of at least one core variable. Non-core variables define the profile in some contexts but not all. They expand the adaptive range of a profile without defining it. Please see Profile Variables Discussed in Each Study for the list of profiles, core variables, and non-core variables discussed in each chapter.

PCA and Profile Results by Individual Studies

This website presents the detailed PCA and Rhetorical Profile analysis results for each study discussed in the book. The variables presented for each study can be accessed at the link Profile Variables Discussed in Each Study.