Analysing Mexico’s President speeches: A study of political propaganda and populist rhetoric in AMLO’s press conferences

Summary

The 2018 federal elections in Mexico brought significant changes in the country’s political landscape, as Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) became president and initiated daily press conferences called “The mornings” (Las mañaneras in Spanish) to keep the public informed about the government’s agenda. Despite the goal of promoting transparency and accountability, the morning speeches have been criticised for potentially being used as propaganda or perpetuating populist rhetoric. This project aims to determine whether the president uses these press conferences for political propaganda or to promote populist ideas. The study analyses official stenographic versions of the speeches from December 2018 to April 2023 using topic modeling and lexicon-based methods. The findings indicate that while the president employs populist rhetoric in his speeches, it only accounts for a small percentage of the speech, ranging from 2% to 4%. Additionally, some topics discussed in the speeches may be used for propaganda purposes.

About this repository

This repository features both the .Rmd file and its knitted PDF counterpart, providing a comprehensive walkthrough of the entire research journey. Uncover the intricacies of data collection and cleaning, delve into the employed methodologies encompassing topic modeling and lexicon-based approaches, and explore the enlightening findings and conclusive insights.

Prerequisites:

• Tidyverse
• RSelenium
• Quanteda
• Quanteda.textstats
• Quanteda.textmodels
• Topicmodels
• ggpubr