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Interesting that "republican" is much more common than "democrat" and has been for all the decades covered by the graph.
by lkrubner 12y ago
Interesting that "republican" is much more common than "democrat" and has been for all the decades covered by the graph.
- _delirium 12y agoYou're comparing different things there: Republican is both the noun and adjective form, while Democrat is only the noun form. "Clinton is a Democrat" and "Bush is a Republican", but "Obama was the 2000 Democratic candidate" vs. "Dole was the 1996 Republican candidate". You could try to adjust for that by comparing Republican vs. the sum of Democratic+Democrat, but that also pulls in unrelated uses of both terms: "democratic reforms in $countryname" and "Irish republicans", especially since it isn't case-sensitive. Which then probably overcounts "democratic", because it's used in that non-US-party sense more than "republican" is. In general this kind of thing makes it very tricky to conclude things from pure word or n-gram frequency counts, since without more semantic annotation there are a ton of confounding issues.
- samirmenon 12y agoIf you graph "republicans" and "democrats", the graphs are almost identical.