# **1. Introduction**

Presidential speeches provide a general reflection of the political priorities and concerns of each government. This is particularly the case of the annual presidential speech to parliaments on the state of their country that the constitutions of many countries mandate. In this paper we provide the first-ever systematic analysis of those annual speeches of Latin American presidents to parliaments over the last two centuries to explore the importance of poverty and inequality as issues drawing political attention in the region.

The present work examines the evolution of poverty and inequality in Latin American political discourse over the last 200 years. Specifically, it addresses the following questions: How has the prevalence of poverty and inequality in Latin American presidential speeches evolved over time? Has the conceptualization of poverty and inequality—i.e., the context of discussion—changed over time? How does the prevalence of poverty and inequality in political discourse relate to the extent of social expenditure, or to the corresponding objective measures of welfare, such as poverty and inequality indicators? In order to address these questions, we use text-mining techniques based on frequencies and co-occurrence of keywords—“Dictionary methods”—as well “topic modeling” to analyze a novel data set of presidential speeches spanning ten Spanish-speaking Latin American countries.

Our findings can be summarized as follows. First, we show that “poverty” and “inequality” have become more prevalent topics in the presidential speeches of Latin America, what we call a “poverty and inequality political enlightenment.” This result is robust to using different thresholds to assess the prevalence of the keywords, to analyzing alternative keywords, and the statistical significance of this result is confirmed via regression analysis. Second, this “enlightenment” seems to be part of a broader increase in socially-oriented policy concerns that is reflected in the overall content of the presidential speeches, as well as in the context in which poverty and inequality have been discussed over time. Specifically, the context in which these subjects are mentioned has evolved towards one that is focused on social development and equality of opportunities. Finally, we find that, on average, the countries that increased their social spending during the 2000s were the ones that devoted greater attention to these topics during the same period. We also find that, on average, relatively poorer countries and those with lower levels of public social spending tend to discuss more about poverty and inequality in their speeches. Relatedly, the most successful countries in reducing poverty and inequality were the ones that discussed these topics the most.

The paper most closely related to ours is Ravallion (2011), where he examines public attention and awareness of poverty through quantitative analysis of text. He uses the Google Books Ngram Viewer, which contains 5.2 million digitized books, to compute the relative frequencies of references to poverty and related topics in the English literature during the period 1700-2000. The incidence of these topics is interpreted as “a linguistic window on public awareness.” Ravallion observes that there was a strong “poverty 2