title: The grand old party - a party of values?
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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology WJH 968, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland St, 02138 Cambridge, MA USA.
authors.forename: Patrick
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Mair
authors.affiliation: Competence Center for Empirical Research Methods, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, Welthandelsplatz 1, 1020 Vienna, Austria.
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Rusch
authors.affiliation: Institute for Statistics and Mathematics, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, Welthandelsplatz 1, 1020 Vienna, Austria.
authors.forename: Kurt
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Hornik
keywords: Multidimensional scaling; Network communities; Republican party; Values