Presidential Policy Priorities from Truman to Trump
As communicated in the annual State of the Union Address
The president’s annual State of the Union address before the House and the Senate, typically delivered in January or February of each year, provides a high-profile forum to recite the administration’s accomplishments and propose new policy initiatives. Two researchers at the University of Melbourne, Mark Quigley and Jeremy Silver, have just published a new paper with a fascinating dataset on presidential priorities as expressed in the State of the Union and also the President’s Budget Memo, a more technical and detailed outline for how administration priorities are to be translated into the president’s budget.
In this post I take an initial deep dive into the Quigley/Silver dataset to explore how presidential priorities have changed (or not) since 1947 on a few important issues. There is a lot here, so let’s dive in.
First, let me briefly explain what Quigley and Silver are doing with their paper, which is titled, “Science advocacy in political rhetoric and actions.” Their focus is on “how science features in presidential communications,” and I encourage you to read their open access paper in full. In this post I use their important and readily accessible (bravo!) State of the Union dataset to perform some complementary analyses.
Quigley and Silver identify 30 “keywords” (and related variants) that are associated with “transcendent topics of presidential communications.” You can see these keywords listed on the right in their figure below. The bars show the relative frequency of use of each keyword (among all keywords) for each president’s State of the Union addresses (hereafter SOTU).
In the figure above you can see that some keywords stand out, like the “economy” represented by the black bars that feature prominently across administrations. Other words are characteristic of just a few administrations, like “terror” under the administration of George W. Bush (see the big yellow bar associated with his addresses).
Here I’ll examine three areas of policy focus across administrations: “Science” + “Research” (added together), “Energy” and the “Economy.” Let’s take a look at each in turn.
Science + Research
I’ve long been interested in symbolic politics. The words we use matter and especially in politics. The figure below shows from the Quigley/Silver dataset the proportion of keyword mentions that were “science” and “research” (combined) for each SOTU address.
A few things stand out to me:
The most attention in SOTUs occurred under Dwight Eisenhower, with just over 6% of the overall focus of attention.
Science and research pretty much disappeared as a focus for most of the Kennedy, Johnson, Ford and Carter administrations, and has been ever present since, with the exception of Bill Clinton’s first term.
There is no clear overall partisan difference, nor is there any long-term trend.
Over the entire dataset science and research together comprise about 3.4% of keyword mentions.
Energy
“Energy” is fascinating. Some take-aways from this time series:
The most prominent feature of “energy” in SOTUs is the 1970s energy crisis, which can be clearly seen in the attention given by Nixon, Ford and Carter.
“Energy” again was emphasized under the presidencies of George W. Bush and even more so under Barack Obama, only to fall again under Donald Trump.
Here as well, there is no clear partisan difference over time.
The Economy
And now for the elephant in the room — The “Economy.”
Note the vertical scale. The “economy” is by far the topic that has received the most attention in SOTUs across administrations. In fact, here are the top 10 focus areas of the SOTUs:
economy
tax
security
health
war
defense
jobs
business
religion
education
In fact, about 25% of keyword mentions are “economy,” “tax,” “jobs,” “business,” and “inflation.” Keywords associated with national defense (“defense,”, “war"," “security”) are a distant second. A few other notable features of this timeseries:
It appears that Truman and Eisenhower focused more on the economy than did other presidents. After their administrations, the focus on the economy is fairly constant.
Democrats have emphasized the “economy” a bit more over time — 14.1% of keyword mentions to 11.9% for Republicans.
The president who focused the least on the economy? Donald Trump by a mile.
Some Additional Thoughts
There is a lot to mine in this fascinating dataset. I am interested in questions such as:
Do expressed priorities in the SOTU match up with priorities as reflected in the President’s Budget memorandum?
Are there topics where presidents give "“lip service” for public consumption but then go in a different direction in budget priorities?
Are there topics for which there is a clear difference in prioritization by political party?
I welcome hearing your questions as well. Now that I have the dataset and I’ve become familiar with it, I’d be happy to take data analysis requests — have a look at the top figure above for the list of keywords. What questions do you have? Feel free to leave these in the comments and I’ll be happy to have a look for a follow-up post.
Having spent over 50 years working in or with the highest levels of Federal, State and local government, I can’t believe someone is measuring political speeches. The first thing I learned, working closely with the Johnson White House, was “Don’t listen to what they say, watch what they do.” Over the 60 years I’ve been watching it, the federal budget dramatically shifted from defense to welfare and medical care. From 1962 to 2022 Defense dropped from 54% to 21% of Federal expenditures, while welfare went from 22% to 36% and medical care exploded from 1.4% to 29%. Find that dramatic shift in your speeches! On the regulatory side, where the government plays a huge role in many sectors, their actions are often totally different from their words. In housing, government regulation has dramatically limited the supply and increased the cost of housing. This vast regulatory apparatus, using “the environment” as cover for rampant NIMBYism, has increased the real cost of housing by at least 50%. Land no longer has value, only permits have value.
The link to the paper doesn't work.
Why are a couple of Australians at U. Melbourne wasting their time on this type of BS?
I would venture to guess that during the Cold War most science and research were directed at National Defense. When the Cold War ended the National Labs, large research Universities and corporations that had been sucking on the government teat for many years had to find a way to keep from going out of business or at a minimum shrinking significantly. Al Gore, Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren along with the Green lobby devised the fiction of a climate and environmental existential problem that needed immediate solutions and top priority. Government agencies grew enormously and new ones were formed and corporate America piled in. The Democrat Party saw this as an opportunity to distinguish themselves from their opposition. People who knew better tried to speak up but over time were either canceled or died.
Climate Change is not an existential problem per se but making believe it is and fashioning policies as though it were may indeed end up being an existential problem. People like RPJr need to call it like it is and push for sane policies based on sound science and stop farting around with meaningless "data".