Jonathon,
It’s a good thing that it’s your job to keep up with this kind of stuff, otherwise, I’d say you have far too much time on your hands!
I honestly feel that most politicians just say what they think their constituents want to hear, not what they truly feel. So what is it that
your really measuring?

Also, as far as measuring concept frequencies go, who’s to say that they’re not doing this already? A while back I tracked Bush’s highlighted speeches from whitehouse.gov and found that his 2nd Inaugural Address had a signature so different from that of his campaign that it could be attributed either to a calculated move to preserve the Reagan Coalition or to a totally new speechwriter generally unfamiliar with the president’s agenda. He spent the next several months trying to bring those two ends together. Here’s the link:
http://theleotest.typepad.com/the_leo_test/2005/07/george_w_bush_a.html

Simply put, testing methods evolve along with the subjects they test. But even if he does start using certain words more, the test will show trends over time, and therefore will be able to create a broader picture and possibly show a political evolution in its own right.

I was just hazing the new kid.

I’m always drawn to metrics. Don’t always believe them, don’t always believe particular interpretations of them, but I enjoy them just the same. There’s never anything wrong with pulling out your scalpel and slicing the world up from a new direction, see what’s in there.

Jonathon, you’ve hooked up with a really great site. Welcome to the exciting, entertaining and profitable (ah hah hah hah, oh, godd–n, that’s always funny,) world of blogging.

I’m not saying this describes Jonathon’s, but it very well may. I’ll willing to take a chance and find out over a year’s time, which is how long he’s agreed to blog with us.

http://theleotest.typepad.com/the_leo_test/2005/08/on_judicial_dec.html

The analysis does not simply rely on the repetition of just one word per principle. Part of the difficulty in developing a reasonable test table is that one must find concepts closely identified with the principle in question, and weed out those terms that are either ambiguous or ambivalent.

On the lighter side of your objection, since a word like “godd–n” is used so frequently beyond the context of religious discussion, it does not qualify as an indicator of a religious or anti-religious position. ;)

Similiarly, some words or phrases one would think would otherwise qualify under one or another of the principles measured actually cannot, either because they stretch across more than one principle or because they are skewed through grammatical or usage conventions.

As far as negative references are concerned, there is indeed a difficulty, but it appears as if some ideological positions are simply negatively defined. Hence, some people who think they are either ‘liberal’ or ‘libertarian’ may actually be ‘anti-conservatives’ instead. I submit that there is a marked difference.

At this stage distinguishing a preference or an anti-preference still requires manual text analysis. This can serve as a means of error-correction.
Also, measurements of an egalitarian, establishmentarian, or libertarian position are not merely a matter of counting only references to one principle. Statements of moderate ideological preferences of any stripe will–indeed must– contain a variety of indicators to liberty, equality, and order.

On a somewhat more serious note, I am very devoted to the concept of liberty but almost never use the word. I just don’t like the word much. In fact, writing in support of liberty I’m more likely to attack those I see as opponents of same and consequently any screed of mine on the topic is likely to use the words “religion,” “religious,” “right wing,” and some other words I know you guys don’t approve of on a PG rated site. I wonder if the preference of some writers for defending a position by attacking its opposite won’t cause problems in your model.

Out of curiosity: Do you have an automated program that you feed text into to count the words in your dictionaries? Or do you do so manually?