The Effects of the State of Union Address of USA Presidents to Their Performance Ratings

<jats:p>In this article, the authors conduct a case study using text mining technique to analyze the patterns of the president's State of the Union Address in USA, and investigate the effects of these speech patterns on their performance rating in the following year. The speeches analyzed include the recent four USA presidents, Bush (1989 – 1992), Clinton (1993 - 2000), G.W. Bush (2001 – 2008), and Obama (2009 – 2011). The patterns found are further integrated and merged with over 4000 surveys on the presidents' performance ratings from 1989 to 2010. Two text mining methodology are applied to study the text patterns. Two predictive modeling techniques are applied to study the effects of these found patterns to their presidential approval ratings. The results indicate that the speech patterns found are highly associated with their approval rates.</jats:p>