Greek Political Language during the Economic Crisis—A Network Analytic Approach

Abstract

In this paper, we seek to analyze pre-electoral political language in Greece with the use of Social Network Analysis. For this analysis, we collected data from the pre-elections speeches of five political leaders from the 20th of September 2015 Greek general elections. We proceed to form, analyze and compare networks of words with an emphasis on financial vocabulary. Findings can provide interesting insights into how political leaders structure their speeches, evaluate important issues and use economic terms and political rhetoric, while different structural patterns can reveal the differences between political parties. Finally, we check whether the overall networks follow the general rules of real-life networks by belonging to the small-world or scale-free categories.