Miljöpartiet and the never-ending nuclear energy debate : A computational rhetorical analysis of Swedish climate policy

Abstract: The domain of rhetoric has changed dramatically since its inception as the art of persuasion. It has adapted to encompass many forms of digital media, including, for example, data visualization and coding as a form of literature, but the approach has frequently been that of an outsider looking in. The use of comprehensive computational tools as a part of rhetorical analysis has largely been lacking. In this report, we attempt to address this lack by means of three case studies in natural language processing tasks, all of which can be used as part of a computational approach to rhetoric. At this same moment in time, it is becoming all the more important to transition to renewable energy in order to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius and ensure that countries meet the conditions of the Paris Agreement. Thus, we make use of speech data on climate policy from the Swedish parliament to ground these three analyses in semantic textual similarity, topic modeling, and political party attribution. We find that speeches are, to a certain extent, consistent within parties, given that a slight majority of most semantically similar speeches come from the same party. We also find that some of the most common topics discussed in these speeches are nuclear energy and the Swedish Green party, purported environmental risks due to renewable energy sources, and the job market. Finally, we find that though pairs of speeches are semantically similar, party rhetoric on the whole is generally not unique enough for speeches to be distinguishable by party. These results then open the door for a broader exploration of computational rhetoric for Swedish political science in the future.