# **2. Presidential speeches data and descriptive statistics**

One of the contributions of our paper is the compilation and use of a novel data set of presidential speeches. The data set is comprised of 953 speeches delivered during the period 1819-2016 in 10 Latin American countries (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, and the República Bolivariana de Venezuela) and Spain.

We selected these countries because their constitutions mandate that the president must give an annual speech that gives an overview of the work the government has performed in each legislative session, as well as an outline of the policy goals and priorities for the future (Dulanto 2006).<sup>1</sup> One can think of these speeches as constituting the respective countries’ closest equivalent of the United States’ “State of the Union Address.” These speeches, therefore, provide a general reflection of the political priorities of each government.

In the case of Spain, no such mandate exists, so we use speeches that closely approximate the programmatic content of the constitutionally-mandated speeches. For the period 19391974, we use Franco’s end-of-year speeches and for the period 1979-1982, we use the inaugural speech each president delivered during the assumption of the presidency. Finally, throughout the 1983-2015 period we rely on a mix of two types of speeches. In years in which a presidential election took place, we use the president’s inaugural speech, whereas in years with no presidential election, we use the speeches presidents deliver during the yearly “debates about the state of the nation,”—a political event that did not become a tradition until 1983. All these speeches embody the programmatic nature of the constitutionally-mandated speeches in the rest of our sample.

The compilation of the data set consisted of a two-stage process: collecting the speeches and processing them. The sources used for speech collection vary by country. Access to most of the speeches from Argentina, Ecuador and Paraguay was through the respective National Congresses and their librarians. In the case of Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, and Mexico, the speeches were collected through a variety of online sources. Most of the República Bolivariana de Venezuela’s speeches were scanned from books containing compilations of presidential speeches available at the US Library of Congress. In Appendix A we list the source of each of the speeches.

The second stage involved processing the speeches to enable text analysis. For the speeches that were already in a digitized format, this meant converting each file into text format and removing any text that did not form part of the speech, such as the title or date. For scanned speeches—i.e., those in “image” format—the text in every page was extracted by performing Optical Character Recognition (OCR), the conversion of images of text into machine-encoded, editable and searchable text. While OCR is certainly more efficient than

> 11 In Appendix A we list the Spanish-speaking Latin American countries that have this constitutional mandate, as well as the specific articles in the constitution that establish this requirement.

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