“Government of the People. . . .”:

Elite Democratic Speech in Comparative Perspective

Darren Hawkins dhawkins@byu.edu

Department of Political Science

Brigham Young University

Paper presented at the Latin American Studies Association 2007 Conference in Montreal, Canada, Sept. 6-9, 2007

Elite political speech is frequently discussed and rarely studied systematically,

especially in comparative perspective. In those discussions, the phenomenon of interest—

the publicly spoken words of political elites—receives a variety of different labels, all of

which have normative and even epistemological connotations. These various labels make

it difficult to announce the topic of study in a relatively objective way that does not pre-

judge the outcome. To label elite speech “discourse,” for example, is to suggest a post-

modern bent most frequently associated with Foucault. For others, speech is little more

than “cheap talk” and hence quite meaningless and unworthy of sustained attention.

“Rhetoric” is another possible label, one that connotes attempted manipulation of others.

In an effort to avoid these various connotations and associated biases, I prefer to rely on

the relatively neutral term, “political speech,” as a counterpart to the study of the

relatively neutral concepts of political institutions and political behavior.

To specify further, we have many comparative studies of democratic institutions

and democratic behavior, but fewer studies of democratic speech, meaning publicly

spoken words about the concept of democracy. For those who believe speech is only

cheap talk, this state of affairs is quite natural and indeed preferable; why waste time

studying something that does not matter? Yet a wide variety of politicians and scholars

persist in thinking that speech matters because it can influence the opinions and behavior

of others (Edwards 2003, 4-6; 241-242). Prominent theoretical perspectives in political

science encourage this view. Comparativists focusing on political culture argue that

people’s beliefs, values, and understandings shape their behavior and institutions and that

those beliefs are accessible through speech (Inglehart 1988; Wood 2003; Diamond 1993).

For many constructivists in international relations, speech provides a window into shared

understandings, and those understandings are so important that they constitute identities

and behavior (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; Wendt 1999). In political psychology,

speech and public documents can be an important tool in assessing worldviews, cognition

and personalities in elites who are otherwise difficult to study up close (Walker 2000;

Mowle 2003).

Attempting to explain the persistence of democracy in Latin America in recent

years despite adverse structural conditions, some scholars have turned to attitude, beliefs

and values. Hagopian and Mainwaring argue (2005, 7):

attitudes toward democracy and a favorable international political environment—for this region, more than the structural variables tapped by modernization theory—have made a decisive difference in whether competetive regimes survive or break down. If the main actors are committed to democracy and if the international poitical environnment is favorable, democracy can survive—at least for an extended time—despite widespread poverty, glaring inequalities, and bad performance. If key actors are not committed to democracy and the international political environment is not favorable, democracy may falter even if economic performance is credible and per capita income is moderately high.

The dark lining on this silver cloud is that mass publics may be growing more

disenchanted with democracy (Hagopian 2005, 319-20). If an appreciation of democracy

and commitment to it, by elites and publics, are a key factor in sustaining democracy,

then it seems wise to probe elite and public understandings of democracy. Speech offers a

way to assess those understandings and hence may suggest a way to gauge the strength of

a democracy or even to forecast probable behaviors. The concern that democracy is

neither understood nor appreciated has helped inform much of the public opinion

research on attitudes toward democracy (Moreno 2001, 28; Almond and Verba 1965).

Over the past several years, scholars have been producing an increasing number of

carefully constructed analyses of public opinion in a range of countries that have

increased our understandings of how people think about democracy (Camp 2001;

Latinobarometer 2006; Sarsfield and Echegaray 2005; Schedler and Sarsfield 2005).

In this paper, I wish to provide a modest contribution to the study of elite speech

regarding democracy, in part to complement studies of mass publics. Curiously, elite

speech has received less attention in comparative politics than mass public speech

(through surveys), perhaps because scholars have a greater distrust of what elites say.1

While we might plausibly believe that everyday citizens will tell an interviewer what they

really belive (though of course we should exercise substantial caution about this inference,

or even the assumption that people have well-formulated beliefs), we should probably be

more skeptical that elites will say what they really believe. Hence, we should be cautious

about asserting that elite speech reflect elite attitudes and understandings. At the same

time, it seems reasonable to assume that elites have some substantive beliefs about

politics and seek to promote those beliefs, at least partially through speech.

While the theories mentioned above suggest ways in which speech influences

behavior or institutions, I begin with a smaller, prior task. In analytical-descriptive

fashion, I wish to identify the relative frequency with which democracy is discussed, the

most common ways of talking about democracy (modes of democratic speech) and the

different types of people or countries associated with those various modes. I focus on

Western Hemisphere presidents since 1990, though I also include presidents prior to 1990

for comparative purposes. The Americas offers an intriguing place to study democratic

speech because it offers a long history of public praise of democracy (historically,

“republicanism”) combined with an extremely uneven record of democratic practice and

1 Analyses of elite discourse may be found in Armony and Armony (2005), Armony (2001) and Bruhn (1999).

institutions. An intriguing potential also exists for identifying a range of similarities and

differences among difference countries and leaders. At one level, American leaders have

long proclaimed a common heritage and similar values; at another level, they have

professed to possess their own sovereign and nationally specific understandings of

democracy. What is the situation? How do Latin American, US and Canadian leaders

publicly talk about democracy? To what extent do they talk about it in similar or

different ways? Does much variation exist from one president to the next within a given

country? Does elite public speech match up with public opinion? Can we discern whether

Latin American presidents value democracy and, if so, what type of democracy?

Why Study Speech Whey even bother studying speech, given that it is often disregarded as cheap talk

(Edwards 2003)? One answer is that it constitutes a large untapped data source. Western

hemisphere presidents make anywhere from a few to several dozen public appearances

each month. Their words at a fairly large number of these have been recorded; speech

archives for current presidents can consist of a few hundred speeches each year. It is also

often quite feasible to find substantial speech archives for presidents who served decades

ago. For example, I have archived 146 speeches of Enrique Cárdenas in Mexico (who

occupied the office in the late 1930s) in digital form. It is even possible to achieve

success with lesser-known figures: Café Filho, who served two years in Brazil in the mid-

1950s, has eight book compilations of his speeches available. One large problem with

this data is that there is too much of it. It is a daunting task to collect and sort through it.

The task is made more difficult by the fact that most presidential speech prior to 2000 or

so exist only in a non-digitized format. To take advantage of the enormous advantages of

digital text, I focus mostly on recent presidents.

Frequency is not a great reason to study something and even reinforces the sense

that words are cheap. Whether words are cheap or costly, however, depends on the point

of comparison. Presidential speech is undoubtedly more costly than the political speech

of most other people because it is much rarer and uttered by those able to wield influence

to turn words into action. Presidential time is costly because it is rare relative to the

demands of the office. If presidential speech were truly cheap, presidents and candidates

would say anything they wanted, fire their speechwriters and related pollsters, fail to

appear on television or radio, skip debates and other public fora, and never bother to spin

or interpret any other event or speech (assuming they took the time to say anything

publicly in the first place). Some presidential speech is especially costly because it is

especially rare, as when the president is able to command wide media and public

attention (e.g., State of the Union speeches) or when the president enjoys an audience of

peers (e.g., addresses at the United Nations). Despite the visibility of the office, not all

presidential speech enjoys dissemination to a wide or important audience and the

opportunity for such dissemination makes speech at those moments particularly costly.

Speech is also costly because it has the potential to shape the impressions,

expectations, and behavior of others. Speech-based threats to punish by force are

undoubtedly less costly than actually sending troops, but also more expensive than urging

others to improve their behavior. A president who announces the threat of force for

violating international rules generates different expectations than one who simply urges

others to conform to rules. If a president who threatens force later backs down, he is

perceived to be weak and thus open to attack from domestic political opponents or, worse,

from real external enemies who could be emboldened by signs of irresoluteness.

Politicians constantly use words to send signals of their intentions or to confuse others

about their intentions; either way, words are useful and hence relatively costly.

Moreover, speech is costly because most politicians have substantive political

programs they wish to implement and only have limited opportunities in which to do so.

Most do not simply seek power, but rather to do something with that power. To achieve

success, they at some point need to inform others of their intentions and plans, and have

limited opportunities to do so. Few politicians are likely to babble when they could

articulate ideas and try to persuade others of their vision. On the other hand, while elites

act as if their speech can influence others, some scholars cast serious doubt on that

possibility. Edwards (2003, 241-242) finds that US presidents hope to achieve many

goals with their public speech but almost never succeed at any of them.

Even if presidential speech does not influence the attitudes and behavior of other

elites, the public, or the media, it reflects, if imperfectly, the underlying attitudes,

priorities and intentions of the president or perhaps of the nation. Mainwaring and Pérez-

Liñán (2005, 44-47) identified changing elite attitudes toward democracy as one of the

key factors contributing to democratization in Latin America. On the flip side, elites

lacking a strong understanding of or commitment to democracy are arguably responsible

for the deterioration of democracy in some countries (Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñán 2005,

49-50). The argument that elite attitudes affect the country’s institutions and practices is

not inherently tautological, but it can easily become so if measurements of attitudes and

commitments are based on behavior. As Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñán point out, there are

no systematic measures of elite attitudes toward democracy across time and space. An

analysis of presidential speech offers the promise of one such indicator. Those who

mention democracy infrequently or do not associate it with rights or accountability in

their speech, for example, might be said to have a weaker commitment to democracy than

others. One could then seriously test hypotheses about elite democratic attitudes leading

to an erosion or fortification of democracy.

In the international relations literature, constructivists argue that shared

understandings and state behaviors are mutually constitutive (Wendt 1999). As states

become more democratic, for example, elite understandings of and commitments to

democratic principles should become stronger and deeper. Mutual constitution implies

that the process also works in reverse: the stronger the commitment to democratic

principles, the more behavior should conform to those principles. Because mutual

constitution is an ongoing, incremental process, it seems unlikely that either attitudes or

behavior would get too far ahead of each other. Moreover, different countries should

move in tandem with each other because elites adopt the identities of other states in the

international system, either through a constitutive process of interaction with each other

or through menchanisms like shaming and social sanctions (Johnston 2001). That is, state

elites alter their attitudes and behavior to conform with other states around them as a

natural result of interacting with those other states. Leading constructivists argue that

background understanings can be inferred from the way that state elites communicate

(Finnemore and Sikkink 1998), yet scholars have collected very little systematic

information on elite speech. Such data could be quite helpful at exploring the

implications of constructivist arguments about shared understandings and the mutually

constitutive relationship between attitudes and behavior.

Methods The most important political elite in most American countries is the president.

Presidential systems, common in the Americas, offer presidents high levels of visibility,

prestige and influence. Whether one believes presidential speech is influential, few would

deny that most presidents choose their speaking opportunities carefully, plan their words

well, and try to learn from past mistakes. Almost all presidents promote their public

words by placing speeches, interviews, and so forth on their websites and seeking other

attention for them. Public presidential speech offers a prominent, well-known and largely

untapped data source.

Collecting that speech poses daunting challenges. Perhaps the most important is

the selection problem. No website or archive records every public utterance of any

president. Because presidents and their staffs decide what to record and publicize and

those decisions vary by individual, scholars cannot be sure what kind of sample they are

collecting. Some presidents speak frequently and seem to record most of it; others either

don’t speak much or don’t record much of it, and in the absence of detailed daily

schedules, one cannot be sure which it is. They also speak in a variety of ways: speeches,

interviews, press conferences, statements, and remarks are among the most common

classifications.

To gather data that can be meaningfully compared, I focused on any statement

that was made orally (omitting items like letters or statements where no oral rendering

could be identified) and that was a monologue (excluding interviews and press

conferences). For each president, I identified the universe of speeches preserved in

writing that met these criteria. I then randomly selected one speech each month. Some

presidents recorded more than 50 speeches in some months while others recorded only

one or even none. I also selected one speech each year that appeared to be the equivalent

of a “state of the union” (SOTU) address. These speeches were typically longer, more

prominent, addressed to a national or a Congressional audience, mandated by constitution

or legislation, occurred at the same time each year, and offered an overview of the

president’s political program. Finally, I selected any speech to the United Nations or the

Organization of American States.

In the following analysis, I use only the SOTU-style speeches from Latin

American presidents to ensure the highest possible levels of comparability and

significance. The final database holds 70 speeches from 12 presidents in 7 countries (see

appendix for list) and totals 559,860 words (519,322 in Spanish). I also use SOTU

speeches from the United States from Roosevelt to present in a more limited fashion as a

point of comparison.

A wide variety of methods is available for analyzing texts and “extracting

meaning” from them (Schonhardt-Bailey 2005). These range from the qualitative

interpretations of individual scholars to an ever-increasing array of sophisticated

computerized techniques that require relatively few human coding decisions. The

tradeoffs facing the researcher in choosing a technique are similar to those between

qualitative and quantitative methods using other kinds of data. A careful, interpretive

reading of any particular text without a preexisting coding rubric yields interesting

insights, but with serious doubts about whether those insights would be replicated by

others or could be generalized to other texts. Many scholars have addressed these issues

by creating a priori analytical categories of theoretical interest and then sorting different

texts into the various categories by using human or machine coders (Hart 2000; Hart and

Jarvis 2002). While this approach has many strengths, it can be quite expensive and time-

consuming and raises questions about the validity of pushing texts into analytical boxes

of interest to the scholar in ways that might obscure important features of the text or alter

meanings that would otherwise be more evident. It also requires well-designed

preexisting analytical categories that are theoretically coherent and empirically valid. It is

also sometimes difficult to achieve high levels of reliability.

Consistent with some of the theoretical approaches outlined above, I am

interested in questions about the relative importance of democracy to Western

Hemisphere elites, how they understand that concept, and ultimately, what influences

their understandings and how their understandings might influence their behavior or that

of others. A careful interpretive reading of all of their speeches and writings would

undoubtedly be beneficial, but incredibly time-consuming (or else highly selective) and

not replicable. Preexisting analytical categories of how elites, or people generally, might

conceptualize democracy are nearly non-existent and just now being developed, but with

little scholarly agreement (Schedler and Sarsfield 2005; Carlin 2006; Canache 2006).

There is little reason to think that elites would talk about democracy in the same

analytical categories as scholars, in part because scholars themselves use so many

different categories.

On balance, the argument for using a quantitative, inductive approach with

relatively few inputs from the analyst is quite strong. Scholars are developing a variety of

techniques that meet this general criteria (Schonhardt-Bailey 2005; Hopkins and King

2007; Quinn et. al. 2006; Murphy et. al. 2006), but I begin with an unsophisticated

frequency analysis and then employ a principal components factor analysis. Simon and

Xenos (2004) have shown how factor analysis can improve on human-created categories

of terms by identifying unexpected associations, especially in the absence of categories

that are well-informed by theory and prior empirical work. The essence of factor analysis

is to identify variables that frequently co-occur, with no prior assumptions about which

variables are likely to co-occur and very few assumptions about the nature of that co-

occurrence (e.g., whether the variables will co-occur in few categories or many). Despite

the fact that factor analysis is an older and relatively well-known technique, it has not

been applied much to textual material in political science.

It is important to note that analysts still make judgments and interpretations in

factor analysis; it is not a “purely objective” or completely computer-driven method (if

anything could be). The most important judgments involve which words to exclude

(either due to their commonality or to their rarity), the appropriate size of the categories

into which the words are sorted, the cutoff point for deciding a co-occurrence is

significant, and the semantic meanings of the resulting categories. The general goal is to

produce categories that are neither too thin (only containing one or two words and thus

difficult to interpret and not much of an analytical advantage over single words) nor too

thick (containing so many different words that it is difficult to pick out common threads).

Before performing the frequency and factor analyses, some pre-processing was

required. I identified all uses of “democracy” and any closely related words with the

same “democ” stem (e.g., “democratization,” “democratic”). To fully capture words

associated with democracy and to standardize as much as possible democracy phrases

between different speakers, I selected 25 words on either side of “democracy” in the text.

(An alternative, for example, would be to select the sentence containing “democracy,”

but sentence length varies widely and words that help interpret “democracy” may occur

in another sentence.) That “democracy phrase” of 51 words became the basic unit of

analysis. I identified 730 such phrases for Spanish-speaking Latin American presidents

and 61 for Portuguese speaking presidents. There were too few Portuguese cases to

produce a factor analysis in that language. Once the phrases were identified and some

formatting and grammatical marks excised, I removed common words largely empty of

content, such as articles, conjunctions, pronouns and prepositions.2 I then collapsed the

remaining words into their common stems, when they existed, relying first on a

lemmatization computer program and then on hand-coding.3 For the Spanish-speaking

presidents, this process produced 2789 unique words out of 37,147 total words in the

democracy phrase database. To focus on the most important words, I removed words

occurring in fewer than 2 percent of the cases, consistent with the practice of others

(Simon and Xenos 2004).

The analyst must choose the appropriate number of factors, a choice subject to

significant methodological controversy (Kline 1994; Child 2006). Using factors with an

eigenvalue greater than one, as is often recommended (Simon and Xenos 2004), produced

a very large number of factors that contained only one or two words each and were thus

semantically difficult to interpret and not much of an advantage over single words. Some

2 I used the Porter stop word list and created equivalent lists for Spanish and Portuguese. It is available at http://snowball.tartarus.org/algorithms/english/stop.txt 3 All of the computerized analysis was performed by WordStat software, produced by Provalis Research, www.provalisresearch.com.

experimentation with different numbers of factors suggested that a range from 30-50 was

about right, creating groups of words that “hung together” semantically. I ultimately

chose 30 factors, in large part to make the data and its interpretation more manageable,

but the results are fairly robust to higher numbers of factors. The analyst must also

choose a cutoff point for the factor loadings of each word within each factor. Factor

loadings express the level of correlation between the word and that category of words.

The traditional cutoff point is .3 (Child 2006, 63-64), a standard I adopted in this analysis.

Word Frequencies

The frequency with which presidents mention democracy can be taken as an

indicator of the prominence and importance that they assign to the concept. Because

words in prominent speeches are relatively costly, presidents are likely to spend more

time on more important concepts. Quinn et. al. (2006) argue that an examination of word

frequency in US Congressional speeches can shed light on how Congress distributes its

attention to different topics, whether those topics arise suddenly or gradually, the ways in

which different policy areas are interrelated and to what extent leaders push their own

agendas or follow those of the public (Quinn et. al. 2006). Much the same logic should

hold for Latin American presidents.

Table 1 identifies the frequencies with which each Latin American president

utilizes “democracy” (or a related word stem) in their prominent SOTU speeches, along

with a list of US presidents for comparative purposes. Interestingly, the weighted

frequency average for Latin American presidents is higher than that for US presidents.

This is only partially because US presidents occupy a much longer time span. If we

restrict the analysis to post-1992 in the United States, the weighted average is closer to

1.05 per 1000 words, still lower than a Latin American count that includes Cárdenas.

Rodríguez, Fox, Zedillo, Lula and Roosevelt lie the farthest above the average while

Kennedy, Eisenhower, Nixon, and Cárdenas lie the farthest below (a list of presidents and

when they served is in the appendix).

Most of these results are not terribly surprising, though they begin to challenge

conventional wisdom in some interesting ways and identify some intriguing patterns.

Four of the five presidents (all save Lula) who use democracy the most frequently were

involved in serious crises or monumental political changes that tested their political

systems while the bottom four either presided over an authoritarian system or faced the

traditional geopolitical struggle of the Cold War. Thus, the frequent use of the concept of

democracy appears to be correlated with struggles to preserve it in the face of threats, or,

in the case of Chávez and perhaps Lula, to refashion it. Of the Latin American countries

sampled, Chile’s democracy is probably the most secure, and its presidents invoke the

concept relatively infrequently. The largest exception to this pattern is Kirchner, who

rarely mentions democracy despite Argentina’s troubled political system.

The results correspond marginally well with president’s reputation for idealism or

realism. Some of the presidents who invoke demcoracy relatively frequently are often

associated with relative idealism (Bush 2, Reagan) and some who don’t use it much at all

are believed to be realists (Nixon, Eisenhower). Nixon—little surprise—receives support

for his reputation as a realist and a disrespecter of basic political ideals by using

“democracy” just once in the 23,728 words that make up his prominent presidential

speeches. But many presidents do not follow this pattern. Kennedy—supposedly an

articulate defender of US ideals and facing a series of foreign policy crises—invoked the

concept of democracy about as frequently as his more realist-minded US counterparts and

as the authoritarian Cárdenas. Bush 2 in the United States, facing a serious crisis after

9/11 and reputed to believe in the importance of spreading democracy, invoked the

concept a little less frequently than his father, the acknowledged realist. While Roosevelt

and the post-Carter US presidents are freqently thought to be democracy promoters,

Roosevelt invoked the concept quite a bit more frequently than any of the others while

Clinton, frequently accused of idealistic foreign policy goals, invoked it fairly rarely.

Overall, the initial impression is that presidents have fairly wide latitude in the

attention they give to the concept of democracy. Those facing crises or involved in

widescale political change seem more likely to invoke the term, but not all do so.

Curiously, Cold War presidents facing a serious challenge from the authoritarian Soviet

Union failed to follow Roosevelt’s lead and invoke democracy much. They may have

been afraid of being charged with hypocrisy for supporting authoritarian rulers while

claiming to support democracy. While Reagan is credited for rediscovering the rhetorical

power of democracy and is believed to have had an idealistic desire to spread democracy,

he invoked the term far less frequently than did Roosevelt. Both Bolivian presidents

faced serious threats to the political system and invoked democracy frequently, but

Kirchner in Argentina also faced an economic and political crisis, especially when he first

came to office, but without discussing democracy much.

To get at the meaning of democracy and not just its prominence, I now turn to an

analysis of other words frequently associated with democracy. Table 2 provides overall

counts for the 50 most frequent words in the democracy phrases in Spanish, as ranked by

the percentage of phrases in which they appear. Table 3 offers the same results in

Portuguese (with a much smaller sample). The first five words on the Spanish list and a

few others in the top 20 could be considered arenas or issues to which democracy applies:

power, politics, society, government, nation, country, Mexico, institution. This issue of

what is democratic thus appears to take precedence over other issues in these speeches.

Identities appear to be in play here; most people would identify themselves with their

government, country, nation, political system, society, and so forth, all of which are

associated in speech with democracy. While we cannot be sure that leaders believe their

countries and institutions are democratic, their speech is quite consistent with a

democratic identity.

The need for action is the next most prominent feature in this frequency list.

Ought is the sixth most frequent word, suggesting an important normative component

associated with democracy, while to make/to do and to live complete the top 10. Other

verbs in the top 30 include participate, strengthen, advance, elect and respect. Down the

list a bit in the 30s and 40s appear words like reform, consolidate, work, achieve,

construct, and demand. Interestingly, time features prominently, especially the present:

New, year, and today all find a place among the 20 most frequent words.

A comparison of different countries and presidents suggests some important

differences between them, as illustrated in Table 4. Uribe is a clear outlier, with

seguridad, fundamento, garantizar, terrorismo, and trabajar found in no other president’s

list of most frequent words. Colombia’s security situation would seem to account for this

difference and suggests that Uribe prefers to associate democracy with increased security.

Chávez is also an outlier, with revolución, decir, popular, and verdad unique among all

the other presidents in his 10 words most frequently associated with democracy, while

pueblo is used frequently by just one other president. For those who understand Chávez

as a populist, this list will come as no surprise, including as it does the words popular,

people, and revolution. The prevalent use of the word truth illustrates his Manichean

discourse. The prominence of the verb “to say” is an oddity and might suggest a strongly

egocentric personality, or at least an egocentric way of speaking. Most of his uses of this

verb consist of him quoting himself (e.g., “as I said”) or others he wants to praise.

Within the same countries, some intriguing similarities and differences arise. Frei

and Lagos in Chile are very close to each other, with perhaps the most notable difference

being Lagos’ emphasis on Constitutional reform, a prospect that was politically less

feasible for Frei. In Mexico, Fox appears more interested in “strengthening” democracy

in “social” “life” while Zedillo emphasizes the “justice” of “elections.” Those differences

correspond with the different phases of the Mexican transition to democracy, where fair

elections opened the way for at least political language about deeper and more lasting

change in Mexico. In Bolivia, Rodríguez, a caretaker president whose main job was to

provide neutral statesmanship in a time of crisis until a new election could be held,

emphasized elections, change, majority and possibilities while Mesa, caught in a storm of

protests and political turmoil, discussed “constructing” “pacts” and the importance of an

Assembly. Few contrasts are as sharp as in Brazil, where Cardoso gave real substantive

meaning to democracy by associating it with deciding, elections, reform, majority, and

economic development. Lula, on the other hand, does not attach much substantive

meaning to democracy, associating it with terms like nation, today, new, ought, power

and go.

The analysis so far suggests that democratic speech corresponds to important

events and trends in the respective countries at the relevant time periods. Probing deeper,

are there any discernible patterns of democratic speech not so closely tied to events and

personalities? Does democracy have any essential meaning for Latin American presidents?

The 2006 Latinobarometer report (2006, 55) argues that the concept does have an

essential meaning for most Latin American citizens: the “meaning of democracy has a

content with a weight that is not easily affected by day-to-day events or by the previous

[survey] question. It is, therefore, a ‘value,’ rather than an opinion or attitude.” In

particular the report finds that Latin Americans respond consistently to an open-ended

question about the meaning of democracy over time (2006, 55). From 2001-06, they

have most frequently associated democracy with civil and individual liberties (35-42

percent, depending on the year), justice and equality (10-13 percent), the right to vote (6-

9 percent), other positive meanings (6-8 percent), the people (4-5 percent), peace and

unity (4-5 percent), rule of law (2-3 percent), social and economic development (2-4

percent), and various negative or neutral meanings (2-3 percent in each category). At the

same time, it is notable that 27 to 32 percent of the public did not know or did not

respond to the open-ended question on the meaning of democracy.

Table 5 compares the frequency with which publics and presidents associate these

various substantive goods with democracy. While the two lists are not directly

comparable (because presidents are using natural speech while citizens are prompted by a

question of what democracy means), it is reasonable to compare the ordinal placements

of these terms as they relate to others in the same list. Like the public at large, Latin

American leaders associate democracy with rights more than with any other substantive

good. For the presidents, liberty and rights are each mentioned (measured separately) in

12 percent of the democracy phrases. These are the first concepts on the overall

frequency list to provide substantive meanings associated with democracy. The

presidents mention justice as frequently as they mention participation and law; each term

appears in 10 percent of the cases. Equality, however, is not much associated with

democracy, occurring in only 2 percent of the cases and placing only 211th on the

frequency list. Unity and peace also do poorly, appearing in only 4 percent and 2 percent

of the cases. The people, development and elections fall somewhere in between, occuring

about 7, 8 and 9 percent of the time respectively. Comparing the ordinal rankings of Latin

American leaders and public, leaders place unity, peace and equality toward the end

while public place them toward the middle. The leaders place rule of law and

development in the middle while publics place them at the end.

Country-level data suggests other interesting patterns (see Table 6). The

Latinobarometer (2006, 58) reports that, among the countries sampled here, Venezuelans

have the largest propensity to associate civil and individual liberties with democracy (63

percent compared to a continental average of around 40 percent). Strikingly, in contrast,

Chávez does not mention the words “rights” or “liberty” in any of his 95 references to

democracy. The gulf between his discourse and public opinion in this respect is enormous.

Bolivia suggests a similar pattern, with 52 percent of the people associating democracy

with individual liberties while Mesa associated democracy with liberty not once and with

rights only 8 percent of the time. On the other end of the spectrum, Mexicans are well

below the regional average in associating democracy with individual liberties (only 22

percent do so) but Mexican presidents are generally above the regional average for

presidents. Fox mentions liberty in 16 percent of the cases and rights in 14 percent while

for Zedillo the figures are 16 percent and 8 percent. The regional average is 12 percent

for both terms.

Grouping Words into Categories

The data above demonstrate which words are most frequently associated with

democracy, but a more complex picture is likely to emerge if we knew which of these

words were also frequently associated with each other. When words are associated

together, they take on different complexities of meaning. Justice associated with law

would be much different than justice associated with revolution, for example. This is

where a factor analysis becomes helpful, and the resulting groupings of Spanish-language

words are reported in Table 7. It is worth noting that enormous variance exists in the

combinations of words associated with democracy and that each of the identified factors

only explains about 1 percent of the overall variance. Most factor analyses produce one

factor that explains much more of the variance than the others, and a few factors that

clearly stand out from the pack (Kline 1994, 39). In the case of democracy speech,

however, the multitude of words that presidents associate with the concept overwhelms

any effort to identify a single group of words whose presence or absence drives much of

the variation.

An initial glance at these categories suggest that most “make sense” because they

hang together in fairly predicatable ways and resonate with familiar ways in which

people talk about democracy. The economic category includes the concepts of fairness,

growth, development, and mandate, suggesting that Latin American leaders typically

associate these concepts together. Rights go along with human, respect, and value; voting

is associated with liberty, decisions, and expression; parties are political, modern, and

part of the system. One of the most interesting features is the concepts that leaders

associate with the various countries. Chile is associated with reform of its Constitution,

no surprise to those familiar with Pinochet’s authoritarian features in that document. The

concept of security is closely associated with Colombia and fundamental guarantees.

Mexico’s democracy is associated with the a fight, generations, and the present.

Venezuela does not appear on the list, but the populist category would be almost certainly

related to Chávez’s speech. One of the few surprises is that revolution is closely

associated with talk, but this is again almost certainly associated with Chávez, who favors

both associating democracy with revolution and quoting himself and others on that point.

It is also worth noting that some relatively frequent words drop out—such as

nation and government—because they are not consistently associated with other words. It

is therefore difficult to assign any semantic meaning to those words, which probably

serve as all-purpose symbols. It is also true that some of these categories do not make

much semantic sense. Very little if any interpretation, for example, can be given to a

category that consists of put, achieve, honor, and road. Factor analysis works best when

the cases to variables ratio is quite high and so perhaps some of these factors will become

clarified as more cases are added to the database.

A deeper consideration suggests a few surprising patterns, especially when one

stops to consider what categories might have been constructed in abstraction. Equality

and opportunity are associated not with voting, rights, liberty or economic status—all

reasonable places to put them—but with education. Liberty is associated not with rights

but with voting. Justice is placed not with equality, liberty, or economics but with

transparency and law. The point is not that the categories utilized most frequently by

Latin American presidents are nonsensical but rather that, in the abstract, reasonable

people could group together these concepts in any number of ways. Latin American elites

have put them together in this particular way, offering insights on how they talk about

and perhaps understand democracy. For example, they tend to discuss consolidation as a

requirement, an end, and a process of conversion or transformation; they also associate it

with getting along. This suggests they understand, or at least talk about, consolidation as

something deeper than just elections or institutions.

The next step in the research process is to test whether these factors are correlated

with behavior in hypothesized ways. To return to the Hagopian and Mainwaring

hypothesis, it is now possible to operationalize democratic convictions by using

presidential speech. The factors that seem to best express such conviction are consolidate,

rights, vote, and transparency. Are countries or presidents who utilize these factors in

their speech relatively frequently also more democratic in behavior? Do countries or

presidents with higher levels of commitment to democracy in their speech face fewer

challenges to democratic stability or survive those challenges better when they occur?

Alternatively, what accounts for higher levels of democratic commitment in speech? Do

countries with longer experiences with democracy have higher commitments? Or perhaps

countries where authoritarian rule was more traumatic and violent, or more recent? With

time series data, one might begin to unravel the question of whether speech leads to more

democratic behavior or vice versa, or whether they move closely together in a msutually

constitutive process as constructivists expect.

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Appendix List of Presidents and Dates of Speeches Analyzed Mexico

Lázaro Cárdenas: 1 Sept. 1935; 1 Sept. 1936; 1 Sept. 1937; 1 Sept. 1938; 1 Sept. 1939; 1 Sept. 1940 Ernesto Zedillo: 1 Sept. 1995; 1 Sept. 1996; 1 Sept. 1997; 1 Sept. 1998; 1 Sept. 1999; 1 Sept. 2000 Vicente Fox : 1 Sept. 2001; 1 Sept. 2002; 1 Sept. 2003; 1 Sept. 2004; 1 Sept. 2005; 1 Sept. 2006 Argentina Néstor Kirchner: 5 June 2003; 1 March 2004; 1 March 2005; 1 March 2006 Chile Eduardo Frei: 21 May 1994; 21 May 1995; 21 May 1998; 21 May 1999 Ricardo Lagos: 21 May 2000; 21 May 2001; 21 May 2002; 21 May 2003; 21 May 2004; 21 May 2005; 21 May 2006 Colombia Álvaro Uribe: 20 July 2003; 20 July 2004; 20 July 2005; 20 July 2006 Bolivia Carlos Mesa: 4 Jan. 2004; 9 Jan. 2005 Eduardo Rodríguez: 22 Jan. 2006 Venezuela Hugo Chávez: 14 Jan. 2005; 6 Jan. 2006; 13 Jan. 2007 Brazil Fernando Cardoso: 15 Feb. 1995; 15 Feb. 1996; 17 Feb. 1997; 16 Feb. 1998; 22 Feb. 1999; 15 Feb. 2000; 15 Feb. 2001; 15 Feb. 2002 Luis Lula da Silva: 17 Feb. 2003; 16 Feb. 2004; 15 Feb 2005; 15 Feb 2006; 1 Jan 2003 (2)

Table 1. Relative Frequency of “Democracy” in Prominent Speeches (# of references per 1000 words) Latin America United States Rodríguez 8.32 Roosevelt 2.02 Fox 6.24 Bush 1 1.25 Zedillo 2.85 Reagan 1.19 Lula 2.24 Bush 2 1.16 Mesa 1.67 Chávez 1.56 Truman 1.00 Uribe 1.54 Clinton 0.95 Cardoso 1.30 Lagos 1.25 Carter 0.60 Frei 1.22 Ford 0.36 Kirchner 0.64 Kennedy 0.22 Cárdenas 0.16 Eisenhower 0.07 Weighted Average 1.41 Nixon 0.04 Weighted Averge 0.82

Table 2 50 words most frequently associated with democracy in Spanish and percent of democracy phrases in which they appear PODER 26.71% TRABAJAR 7.26% POLITICO 22.19% LOGRAR 7.26% SOCIAL 22.19% CONSTRUIR 7.12% GOBIERNO 19.73% EXIGIR 6.85% NACION 18.49% HISTORIA 6.71% DEBER 16.71% REPUBLICO 6.71% CIUDADANO 16.44% VERDAD 6.58% PAIS 14.66% PRESIDENTE 6.58% HACER 13.97% MEJOR 6.58% VIVIR 13.84% VALORAR 6.58% MÉXICO 13.01% INSTITUCION 12.60% NUEVO 12.60% LIBERTAD 12.19% DERECHO 12.05% AÑO 11.78% RESPETAR 11.37% HOY 10.82% PLENO 10.82% FUERTE 10.68% PARTICIPAR 10.14% LEY 10.00% MEXICANO 10.00% JUSTICIA 10.00% FORTALECER 10.00% PÚBLICO 9.59% ECONOMIA 9.18% ELEJIR 8.77% DAR 8.63% DESARROLLAR 8.36% AVANZAR 8.36% RESPONSABILIDAD 8.22% MAYOR 8.08% REFORMAR 7.95% SISTEMA 7.81% CONSTITUCION 7.81% PUEBLO 7.40% CHILE 7.26% DECIR 7.26% FUNDAMENTO 7.26% CONSOLIDAR 7.26%

Table 3 50 words most frequently associated with democracy in Portuguese and percent of democracy phrases in which they appear ESTADO 55.7% PARTICIPAR 9.8% GOVERNAR 23.0% PRESIDENTE 9.8% SOCIEDADE 23.0% RESPEITAR 9.8% POLITICO 19.7% SEM 9.8% PAIS 19.7% TRANSFORMAR 9.8% PODER 19.7% ASPIRAÇÕES 9.8% DECIDIR 21.3% AÇÃO 8.2% INTERNACIONAL 19.7% BASE 8.2% MAIORIA 11.5% CASA 8.2% REFORMA 11.5% NACAO 19.7% SOCIAL 16.4% DESENVOLVIMENTO 18.0% ECONOMIA 16.4% ELEITOR 16.4% JUSTO 14.8% CONSTITUCIONAL 13.1% HUMANO 11.5% IR 13.1% LEGISLATIVO 11.5% NOVA 11.5% TRABALHAR 13.1% AMPLIAR 11.5% CONGRESSO 9.8% CONSOLIDAR 11.5% CRESCER 11.5% DAR 11.5% DEVER 9.8% DIFERENTE 8.2% DIREITOS 9.8% HOJE 11.5% MAIOR 11.5% MUNDO 11.5% RELACAO 11.5% REPUBLICA 11.5% SENHOR 11.5% VIVER 9.8% AMÉRICA 11.5% IMPORTAR 9.8% NECESSITAR 9.8% PALAVRA 8.2%

Table 4 Top 10 words associated with democracy by president, ranked by percent of democracy prases in which they appear Cárdenas (13 cases) Zedillo (156 cases) Fox (216 cases) Público 46 Político 29 Social 37 Gobierno 38 Mexicano 29 Político 28 País 38 Gobierno 26 México 27 Deber 23 Poder 24 Poder 26 Base 23 México 24 Ciudadano 24 Ciudadano 23 Deber 21 Vivir 21 Economía 23 Pleno 21 Hoy 20 Institución 23 Ciudadano 19 Gobierno 20 Social 23 Elegir 18 Fortalecer 19 Voluntad 23 Justicia 18 Institución 19 Kirchner (27 cases) Frei (73 cases) Lagos (71 cases) Nación 41 País 29 Chile 45 País 37 Chile 29 Poder 27 Derecho 26 Poder 26 Hacer 24 Relación 26 Nación 23 Constitución 24 Político 22 Política 22 Libertad 24 Ciudadano 22 Sistema 22 Ano 21 Humano 22 Ano 22 Reformar 21 Poder 22 Derecho 19 Derecho 21 Historia 22 Respetar 19 Gobierno 20 Desarrollar 19 Vivir 18 Social 18 Uribe (39 cases) Mesa (26 cases) Rodríguez (14 cases) Seguridad 64 Nuevo 42 Elegir 43 Colombia 36 Poder 27 Sistema 36 Social 31 Ciudadano 27 Bolivia 36 Fundamento 26 Querer 27 Cambiar 29 Garantizar 23 Pactar 27 Poder 29 Terrorismo 23 Bolivia 23 Político 29 Trabajar 23 Modelo 23 Mayor 29 Público 23 Deber 23 Posible 29 Pueblo 21 Asamblea 23 Marcar 29 Hacer 18 Construcción 23 Deber 29

Table 4, continued Chávez (95 cases) Cardoso (39 cases) Lula (22 cases) Poder 44 Brasil 62 Brasil 46 Revolución 42 Estado 33 Pais 36 Decir 27 Governar 28 Poder 32 Popular 23 Decidir 28 Ir 27 Verdad 23 Politico 26 Dever 23 Gobierno 22 Sociedade 23 Nacao 23 Nación 22 Eleitor 23 Social 23 Participar 22 Reforma 21 Respeitar 23 Nuevo 19 Maioria 18 Hoje 23 Pueblo 18 Economia 18 Nova 23 Desenvolv. 18 Republica 23 Crescer 18

Table 5 Frequency with which Latin American publics and presidents associate key substantive words with democracy Public (2001-06 high) Presidents, Spanish language Civil and Individual Liberties 42 Liberty 12 Justice and Equality 13 Rights 12 Right to Vote 9 Participation 10 Other Positive Meanings 8 Law 10 Govt. of, by and for the people 5 Justice 10 Peace and Unity 5 Elections 9 Social and Economic Development 4 Development 8 Rule of Law 3 Responsibility 8 Negative Meanings 3 Reform 8 Other Neutral Meanings 3 Majority 8 Truth 7 Unity 4 Peace 4 Equality 2 Source for Column 1: Latinobarometer 2006, 55. Column 2 is the percent of democracy phrases in which those words appear.

Table 6 Association of Democracy with Individual Liberties, by country Public (2006 survey) Presidents (% democracy phrases with word) Venezuela 63 Chávez 0 derecho 0 libertad Bolivia 52 Mesa 8 derecho 0 libertad Argentina 49 Kirchner 26 derecho 4 libertad Chile 46 Lagos 21 derecho 24 libertad Colombia 35 Uribe 8 derecho 8 libertad Brazil 24 Lula 0 dereitos 9 liberdade Mexico 22 Fox 14 derecho 16 libertad Regional Average 42 Spanish-speaking 12 derecho Presidents 12 libertad Source for Column 1: Latinbarometer 2006, 58.

Table 7 Word Groups associated with each other in Spanish democracy phrases, as extracted by Factor Analysis (all factor loadings are .3 or above). The word representing the factor on the left either represents a common theme or the one with the largest loading within the factor. Economy Economy; Fairness; Growth; Development; Mandate; Firm;

Integral; Social Populism Truth; World; People; Deepen; Popular Fight Mexico; Mexican; Generation; Today; Fight Consolidate Consolidate; Require; End; Live Together; Convert; Tasks Institutions Legislature; Executive; Power/Ability; Congress Rights Human; Rights; Respect; Value Gender Men; Women Chile Constitution; Reform; Republic; Aspire Responsive Good; Conviction; Assure; Work; Full Duty Confront; Preserve; Assume; Ought; Unite; Problems; Cause Vote Essence; Vote; Liberty; Decide; Express Open Confide; Open; Legitimate; Debate Transparency Transparency; Approve; Legal; Law; Justice; Demand; Elect Security Security; Guarantee; Colombia; Fundamental Culture Give; Culture; Advance; Construct Strength Strength; Necessity; Day; Recognize Effectiveness Effectiveness; Institutions Collective Collective; Require; Interests; Create; Conditions Revolution Talk; Revolution; Continue Peace Peace; Nation; Defend Achieve Put; Achieve; Honor; Road New New; Initiate; Mark (verb) Region Region; Gain; Capacity; Permit Construct Construct; Establish; Governable; Find Repesent Represent; Pluralism Authority Authority; Act; Principle; Compromise Education Education; Opportunity; Equal; Person Discuss Want; Discuss; Think; Practice Parties Parties; Modernize; Politics; System