Analysing the Irish 2011 General Election party manifestos and Irish political statements from the Irish Parliament (Dáil) using text analytics

This research paper uses text visualisation methods, such as Wordclouds, to emphasis the key terms used by different political parties throughout the 2011 Irish Parliament (Dáil) period; this includes the final sessions of the 30th Dáil before the 2011 General Election and the entire 2011 sessions of the 31st Dáil. Using term frequencies this research clearly shows the topics that were important to each relevant political party. This study also highlights the key differences that may reside between what a political party stated clearly in their election manifesto and what was written on Dáil transcript records during the course of 2011. The main objective of this research is exploring and understanding ways in which key political information can be summarised and subsequently displayed in an intuitive visual fashion as a guiding education facility.