Robert Magee, Associate Professor of Integrated Marketing Communication, The University of MIssissippi (Ole Miss)
Do some political candidates use first-person (I, we) or second-person pronouns (you, you all) more often in their campaign tweets?
In this course exercise, students learn how to test distributions (analyze, distribution, test probabilities) using a grouping variable (BY). The data set is comprised of tweets (N = 1107) from the early stages of the 2016 U.S. presidential primary season.
First-person pronouns focus on the speaker, or possibly, the group to which the speaker belongs. Second-person pronouns communicate a personal connection to the audience, suggesting that the candidate might be seeking to establish a personal connection.
A chi-squared test of the relationship between political party (Democrat vs. Republican) and the use of first person (Present vs. Absent) is significant. The distributions are tested against a 50-50 distribution to see if Democrats or Republicans are more likely to use first-person pronouns.
The test of the use of second-person pronouns occurs at the canditate level. In this data set, political candidates use the second person in 20% of their tweets. But who uses second person more (or less) than the other candidates? In this part of the exercise, students compare each candidate's use of the second person against the group's 80-20 distribution.
Tests are conducted on tweets from Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump. The results indicated that only some of the candidates used second-person pronouns more often than the group average.