Its a cloudy Monday morning. The General elections are starting in India today. My social network is flooded with election news and views, a lot of them posted by, none other than me! So in the same spirit of adding a drop to this sea of opinions, I decided to do a content analysis of the election manifestos of the two biggest parties contending in the the Indian elections, the Congress and the BJP.
For those who are unaware, Content Analysis is a research method , as Berelson defined it "objective, systematic, and quantitative description of the manifest content of communication". Basically certain codes are created, then the particular text is analysed using that code (Eg: Counting the number of times IPL and corruption are used together).
I employed the same technique but instead of phrases or sets of words , I chose to see how many times one particular word was used in both manifestos. The results were as usual, unbelievable!!
Let me start with the most favorite word of the politicians- Development. The BJP used this word 84 times while the congress 56. "Women" on the other hand made an appearance of 58 times in the Congress manifesto and 37 in the BJP's. "Growth" had 33 hits with BJP and 49 with the congress.
Welfare, Job, Corruption, Education, Pakistan, Minorities, Poverty, Crime, LokPal, Youth, FDI, Food, Maoist, Sustainable, Rural, Industry, Business- All these words appeared almost the same number of times, with sometimes difference of 1 or 2.
The LGBT community and the North-East is not on anyone's agenda.
But when it comes to bragging rights, the competition explodes beyond the roof! While the BJP talked about themselves for a modest 117 times, the Congress made its presence sure with 265 in their manifesto!
Now if a Martian (to be unbiased) took these two documents and cleared them of all the colors and stylistic elements, and replaced the names of the parties with arbitrary names like XYZ or ABC, no one, not even Modi and Rahul Gandhi , could tell the difference between the two!
On the contrary , they would resemble, two long lost brothers in a Bollywood movie, reunited, after the see similar tattoos on their forearms. In this case the tattoo would say "Slaves of" on one hand and "Capitalism" on the other!!
So, go and vote, for this is democracy!
This research method might have flaws and inter-coder reliability is quintessential in Content Analysis. So please try it out.
For those who are unaware, Content Analysis is a research method , as Berelson defined it "objective, systematic, and quantitative description of the manifest content of communication". Basically certain codes are created, then the particular text is analysed using that code (Eg: Counting the number of times IPL and corruption are used together).
I employed the same technique but instead of phrases or sets of words , I chose to see how many times one particular word was used in both manifestos. The results were as usual, unbelievable!!
Let me start with the most favorite word of the politicians- Development. The BJP used this word 84 times while the congress 56. "Women" on the other hand made an appearance of 58 times in the Congress manifesto and 37 in the BJP's. "Growth" had 33 hits with BJP and 49 with the congress.
Welfare, Job, Corruption, Education, Pakistan, Minorities, Poverty, Crime, LokPal, Youth, FDI, Food, Maoist, Sustainable, Rural, Industry, Business- All these words appeared almost the same number of times, with sometimes difference of 1 or 2.
The LGBT community and the North-East is not on anyone's agenda.
But when it comes to bragging rights, the competition explodes beyond the roof! While the BJP talked about themselves for a modest 117 times, the Congress made its presence sure with 265 in their manifesto!
Now if a Martian (to be unbiased) took these two documents and cleared them of all the colors and stylistic elements, and replaced the names of the parties with arbitrary names like XYZ or ABC, no one, not even Modi and Rahul Gandhi , could tell the difference between the two!
On the contrary , they would resemble, two long lost brothers in a Bollywood movie, reunited, after the see similar tattoos on their forearms. In this case the tattoo would say "Slaves of" on one hand and "Capitalism" on the other!!
So, go and vote, for this is democracy!
This research method might have flaws and inter-coder reliability is quintessential in Content Analysis. So please try it out.
