# Quantifying the Uniqueness and Divisiveness of Presidential Discourse

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.01405 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01405/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Textbooks Are All You Need II: phi-1.5 technical report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05463/) (2023)
- [Annotators with Attitudes: How Annotator Beliefs And Identities Bias Toxic Language Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07997/) (2021)
- [Ex Machina: Personal Attacks Seen at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.08914/) (2016)
- [On the State of the Art of Evaluation in Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.05589/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Classifying populist language in American presidential and governor speeches using automatic text analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15213/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Do American presidents speak discernibly different from each other? If so, in what ways? And are these differences confined to any single medium of communication? To investigate these questions, this paper introduces a novel metric of uniqueness based on large language models, develops a new lexicon for divisive speech, and presents a framework for assessing the distinctive ways in which presidents speak about their political opponents. Applying these tools to a variety of corpora of presidential speeches, we find considerable evidence that Donald Trump's speech patterns diverge from those of all major party nominees for the presidency in recent history. Trump is significantly more distinctive than his fellow Republicans, whose uniqueness values appear closer to those of the Democrats. Contributing to these differences is Trump's employment of divisive and antagonistic language, particularly when targeting his political opponents. These differences hold across a variety of measurement strategies, arise on both the campaign trail and in official presidential addresses, and do not appear to be an artifact of secular changes in presidential communications.