Science advocacy in political rhetoric and actions

Abstract

‘Science’ is a proportionately small but recurring constituent in the rhetorical lexicon of political leaders. To evaluate the use of science-related content relative to other themes in political communications, we undertake a statistical analysis of keywords in U.S. Presidential State of the Union (SOTU) addresses and Presidential Budget Messages (PBM) from Truman (1947) to Trump (2020). Hierarchical clustering and correlation analyses reveal proximate affinities between ‘science’ and ‘research’, ‘space’, ‘technology’, ‘education’, and ‘climate’. The keywords that are least correlated with ‘science’ relate to fiscal (‘inflation’, ‘tax’) and conflict-related themes (‘security’, ‘war’, ‘terror’). The most ubiquitous and frequently used keywords are ‘economy’ and ‘tax’. Science-related keywords are used in a positive (promotional) rhetorical context and thus their proportionality in SOTU and PBM corpora is used to define fields of science advocacy (public perception advocacy, funding advocacy, advocacy) for each president. Monte Carlo simulations and randomized sampling of three elements: language (relative frequency of usage of science-related keywords), funding (proposed funding and allocated discretionary funding of science agencies), and actions (e.g. expediency of science advisor appointments, (dis-) establishment of science agencies) are used to generate a science advocacy score (SAS) for each president. The SAS is compared with independent survey-based measures of political popularity. A myriad of political, contextual, and other factors may contribute to lexical choices, policy, and funding actions. Within this complex environment ‘science’ may have political currency under certain circumstances, particularly where public and political perceptions of the value of science to contribute to matters of priority align.