Campaign Speeches and Public Acceptance in Contemporary Japan

Topic Signatures in Political Campaign Speeches

Highlighting the recurrence of topics usage in candidates speeches is a key feature to identify the main ideas of each candidate during a political campaign. In this paper, we present a method combining standard topic modeling with signature mining for analyzing topic recurrence in speeches of Clinton and Trump during the 2016 American presidential campaign. The results show that the method ext...

Divorce in contemporary Japan.

Data from the 1985-86 Japanese census are analysed to explore the determinants of the divorce rates in Japan's forty-seven prefectures, using two theoretical models: (a) the social integration model, which is shown to have a greater utility in predicting Japanese divorce levels than (b), the human capital model. Female emigration patterns play a significant role in affecting the divorce rate. P...

A Readability Analysis of Campaign Speeches from the 2016 US Presidential Campaign

Introduction The goal of this report is to assess the readability of the campaign speeches of five presidential candidates in the 2016 US presidential race and to examine their evolution over time and according to the type of speech. Readability can be defined here as the reading level, from grade 1 to grade 12, of a document. It is determined by looking at the lexical contents and the grammati...

Legal Reform in Contemporary Japan

Documentation Center on Contemporary Japan (

W ith repeated political corruption and scandals as well as opaque alliances and split political parties and factions, the political world of Japan has appeared particularly dismal in the past ten years. Some now perceive it as a “lost decade” in politics. Political cynicism has gradually deepened, but citizen participation in politics has grown active over the Internet despite simultaneously d...