Political Discourse Analysis Through Solving Problems of Graph Theory

In this article, we show how, using graph theory, we can make a content analysis of political discourse. Assumptions of this analysis are: - we have a corpus of speech of each party or candidate; - we consider that speech conveys economic, political, socio-cultural values, these taking the form of words or word families; - we consider that there are interdependences between the values of a political discourse; they are given by the co-occurrence of two values, as words in the text, within a well defined fragment, or they are determined by the internal logic of political discourse; - established links between values in a political speech have associated positive numbers indicating the "power" of those links; these "powers" are defined according to both the number of co-occurrences of values, and the internal logic of the discourse where they occur. In this context we intend to highlight the following: a) which is the dominant value in a political speech; b) which groups of values have ties between them and have no connection with the rest; c) which is the order in which political values should be set in order to obtain an equivalent but more synthetic speech compared to the already given one; d) which are the links between values that form the "core" political speech. To solve these problems, we shall use the Political Analyst program. After that, we shall present the concepts necessary to the understanding of the introductory graph theory, useful in understanding the analysis of the software and then the operation of the program. This paper extends the previous paper [6].