Words matter, especially for elected officials whose careers prosper or falter on the cut and thrust of political debate. So with the US Congress now back in action after its summer recess, Â鶹´«Ã½ has used a neat online tool to find out which members are uttering the words that lie close to our readers’ hearts.
is a project of the , a non-profit group founded in 2006 to use “the revolutionary power of the Internet to make information about Congress and the federal government more meaningfully accessible”.
Type a word into its search box, and you see a graph charting the total number of times it appeared in the over time. Mentions of , for instance, peaked at around 3000 per month in April 2007, during debate over a bill that would have expanded funding for research on human embryonic stem cells – eventually vetoed by President George W. Bush.
Also revealing are the “top ten” graphs showing the lawmakers who have used each word most frequently over the past two years.
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Heading the are two members of the House of Representatives: , a Republican from California with a long-standing interest in space and aeronautics, and Washington Democrat , a proponent of clean energy technology.
Frequent utterers of “science” include Maryland Senator , who regularly pushes for increased research funding. She is joined from the House by fellow Democrats of Tennessee, who chairs the House Science and Technology Committee, and of New Jersey, who was a physicist before turning to politics – he was once assistant director of the and holds a patent on a .
But the name heading the science list, with 166 mentions over the past 2 years, may come as a surprise: Republican Senator of Oklahoma. His strident opposition to measures to combat climate change has made him a figure that some advocates of environmental science love to hate.
“He’s the outlier,” says Jim Turner, acting executive director of , a group in Washington DC that aims to put science at the heart of political debate.
Inhofe – who infamously once invited author , a fellow climate-change sceptic, to testify to the Senate on the – also heads the list of members most likely to say “climate”. He is denied the top spot for “environment” only by Democratic Senator of California, one of the greenest members of Congress.
Passion index
“People talk about what they’re passionate about,” observes of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington DC. “Being passionate about something doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a proponent.”
Â鶹´«Ã½ wondered whether the raw counts displayed on Capitol Words tell the whole story, given that members who talk a lot are inherently more likely to make the top-ten lists. So we asked the Sunlight Foundation to calculate some revised lists based on the frequency of a word’s use per thousand words spoken (discounting common words like “of” and “to”, and others that reflect details of Congressional procedure).
The revised top tens reveal the passions of some of the quieter members of Congress, whose particular interest in science-related subjects is not always clear. Inhofe disappears from the “science” list, replaced at the top by Representative , a Democrat from Washington who holds a PhD in clinical psychology, and whose include attempts to expand funding for research into ocean acidification and the behavioural aspects of climate change.
The revised list for “health”, previously dominated by members who speak at length on a wide range of topics, is headed by , a Democratic member of the House from Rhode Island whose signature issue is healthcare – an interest inherited from his father, the late Senator .
“Health” was the top buzzword overall in the month before lawmakers took off for their summer break, with more than 13,000 mentions – no surprise given the intense debate over healthcare reform.
Science beats God
Capitol Words also allows you to , which may provide some insights into the flavour of coming debates. With a bill to limit greenhouse gas emissions next on the Senate’s agenda, does the fact that indicate that concerns about energy supply will dominate over environmental protection?
Â鶹´«Ã½ readers may be interested to learn that . Is this good news for those who want political debate to be driven by empirical evidence rather than faith? Or perhaps the infrequent mentions in Congress of a deity simply reflect the US Constitution’s separation of church and state.
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