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. 2014 Nov 27:3:697.
doi: 10.1186/2193-1801-3-697. eCollection 2014.

The grand old party - a party of values?

Patrick Mair  1 , Thomas Rusch  2 , Kurt Hornik  3
Affiliations

The grand old party - a party of values?

Patrick Mair et al. Springerplus. .

Abstract

In this article we explore the semantic space spanned by self-reported statements of Republican voters. Our semantic structure analysis uses multidimensional scaling and social network analysis to extract, explore, and visualize word patterns and word associations in response to the stimulus statement "I'm a Republican, because …" which were collected from the official website of the Republican Party. With psychological value theory as our backdrop, we examine the association of specific keywords within and across the statements, compute clusters of statements based on these associations, and explore common word sequences Republican voters use to characterize their political association with the Party.

Keywords: Multidimensional scaling; Network communities; Republican party; Values.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
MDS solution based on constant input dissimilarities.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Word configuration plot resulting from PGMDS showing the associations between keywords in self-reports and value clusters.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Fan dendrogram resulting from post MDS cluster analysis.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Top panel: full network with two big communities. Bottom panel: two small network communities.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Big network communities from Figure 4.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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