Presidential debates are an important opportunity for candidates to share their platforms. debates provides easy access to debate transcripts from Presidential, Vice Presidential, and primary candidate debates. The current version includes Presidential and Vice-Presidential debate transcripts starting in 1960, and for most debates from the 2012, 2016, and 2020 primary elections. debates includes one dataset, debate_transcripts, as a compact rda object. Once the package is installed and loaded, the dataset can be loaded using the data() function.
debate_transcripts includes speaker-level and debate-level data. Each row in debate_transcripts represents one statement. Along with the text of the statement, each row includes the speaker's name and an indicator variable that identifies whether or not the speaker is a candidate (as opposed to being a moderator, an announcer, or someone asking a question). Each row also indicates the date, location, and type of debate. To suggest additional fields, please open an issue.
For more information on how the dataset was compiled, see the file TUPD.pdf, also available here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3611815
To install debates, use the install_github function from the devtools package:
library(devtools)
install_github("jamesmartherus/debates")
Alternatively, you can download transcripts.rda directly from the data folder.
library(debates)
data(debate_transcripts) #Load Transcript Data File
- Transcripts were gathered from a variety of sources including Rev.com, debates.org, and a variety of news sites.