Text Mining and Visualization of Political Party Programs Using Keyword Extraction Methods: The Case of Portuguese Legislative Elections.

Extracting keywords from textual data is a crucial step for text analysis. One such process may involve a considerable amount of time when done manually. In this paper, we show how keyword extraction techniques can be used to untap texts of political nature. To accomplish this objective, we conduct a case-study on top of 16 Portuguese (PT) political party programs made available in the context of the legislative elections that took place in 30th of January 2022. Our contributions are two-fold. At the level of resources, we make available a curated dataset and a python notebook that systematizes the process of transforming text into quantitative data and into visual aspects. At the methodological level, we propose to extend the keyword extraction algorithm used in this study to extract the most relevant keywords, not only from individual political party programs, but also across the entire collection of documents. A further contribution is the case-study itself, which calls attention to the fact that such solutions may be of interest not only to common people, but also to journalists or politicians alike. Broadly, we demonstrate how the discussion and the analysis that stems from the results obtained may foster the political science research by making available large-scale processing of documents with marginal costs.