Psychology, language and communication: Analysis with the tool LIWC of the speeches and tweets from the candidates to 2012 Galician elections

Resum

Linguistic styles of the 7 major candidates for election to the Parliament of Galicia in 2012 were analyzed using the Spanish version of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program.We analyzed the speeches of the opening and closing sessions of the campaign and the tweets posted during the 15-day official campaign period by the candidates.The Kruskal-Wallis test was used to determine differences in the percentage of use of categories of words in the texts of the seven candidates, resulting significant (p≤0.01) in 16 of the categories analyzed. Possible interpretations of these results are discussed, highlighting the usefulness of LIWC as a complementary strategy for the analysis of political texts.