Detecting Authorship in Political Texts with Inductive Stylometry

Abstract:Political texts are rarely authored by the nominal speaker alone. Tweets, speeches, reports, and official statements are drafted, edited, or harmonized by staff, yet political science has paid limited attention to the stylistic traces these hidden authors leave behind. This paper develops and stress-tests an inductive stylometric approach for recovering latent authorship structure in political communication, combining character 3-gram features with UMAP dimensionality reduction, and Burrows' Delta. We apply the approach to six corpora that vary in length (from tweets to long documents), in mode (written and oral), and in language (English and Hungarian). The approach recovers near-disjoint analyst fingerprints in formal legal prose in both languages, sorts a politician's tweets into validated subsets while uncovering additional insights, and distinguishes scripted from improvised speech. It fails, however, to resolve individual speechwriters within scripted corpora. Frequency-based stylometry is thus a powerful tool that, depending on authorial signal strength and institutional editing, can uncover authorship traces relevant to legislative studies, political communication, and policy research.

34 pages, 17 figures, 3 tables. Includes appendices A-D (validation materials and discriminant validity checks). Under review

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2609.08459 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2609.08459v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.08459 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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