After the analysis of the faultlines project led to observations about the growing gap between the parties in the American two party systems I decided a reasonable followup project could be designed around an analysis of the party platforms. By using Natural Language Processing, the goal will be to observe a similar pattern of growing distance between the ways that the two parties talk about particular issues.
The data collected for this project was webscraped from www.presidency.ucsb.edu. It includes transcripts from party platforms and presidential State of the Union Addresses since 1972. Data was organized by party and president. There are 11 platforms from each party since 1972. As for State of the Union Addresses in the same time period, there has been 25 Republican and 17 Democratic speeches.