Language of politics : studies in quantitative semantics

The central theme of this book is that political power can be better understood in the degree that language is better understood, and that the language of politics can be usefully studied by quantitative methods. Part of the volume is given over to the technical problems of quantification, but space is taken up with "applications," chiefly to the language of communism since 1918. Specialists on government, diplo matic history and law will find themselves most at home among the "applications," while social psychologists and statisticians, on the other hand, will examine in detail the treatment of reliability, validity and sampling.

Most of the work reported here was done at the University of Chicago or in connection with the War Communications Research Project at the Library of Congress. The Project was financed by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation as part of a program for the advancement of research in the field of communication initiated by John Marshall and David Stevens of the Foundation. The facilities made available by the University, the Foundation and the Library of Congress (under the librarianship of both Archibald MacLeish and Luther H. Evans) are gratefully acknowledged. The relation ship of these studies of political communication to the rapidly expanding field of research on mass communication can be ascertained by consulting the articles and literature in Propaganda, Communication, and Public Opinion; A Comprehensive Reference Guide, by Bruce Lannes Smith, Harold D. Lasswell and Ralph D. Casey (Princeton Univer sity Press, 1946), and the earlier survey, Propaganda and Promotional Activities; An Annotated Bibliography, by Lasswell, Casey and Smith (University of Minnesota Press, 1935).