Quotes as Data Extracting Political Statements from Dutch Newspapers by applying Transformation Rules to Syntax Graphs

To understand the relation between media and politics, it is necessary to study the content of politicians’ statements in the news. By using syntactic analysis and topic models, this paper looks at how often politicians are quoted, and whether their media statements are similar to their statements in parliament. While media attention simply follows political power, this is quite dierent for media statements. The frequency of statements is a matter of journalistic demand (e.g. high during scandals) and political supply (e.g. low during closed-door negotiations). Media statements are most similar to political discourse during the campaign, and for limited-issue parties. Some interesting results were found, with the anti-immigration PVV being relatively dissimilar during the campaign, and possible coalition partners being relatively dissimilar during the coaltion talks. This paper is a promising rst step into the relatively understudied area of mediated politics.