CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Bektursyn, Nurbek |
|---|---|
| Title | Decoding Signals in Kazakhstan's Presidential Speeches: Insights from Topic and Sentiment Analysis |
| Summary | The State of the Nation Address (SONA) is a key policy speech by the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan. It articulates the president’s position on the country’s central issues and presents the mid-term action plan to manage them. I use structural topic modeling and sentiment analysis to examine the interplay between the content and sentiment of presidential speeches and the macroeconomic state of the country. Using 28 SONAs from the President’s official website and multiple macroeconomic indicators such as real GDP and FDI, I determine 9 main topics covering areas from Education & Healthcare to Foreign Affairs. Notably, Industrial Development is the most prevalent topic across all addresses and increased from 0.03% in 1999 to over 42% in 2023. There are also notable differences in the topics discussed by the presidents. Tokayev prioritized the discussion of topics like Reforms & Democracy, while Nazarbayev paid more attention to National Identity. I also uncover that real GDP is of great importance for presidents, having a statistically significant association with the prevalence of most topics. Additionally, sentiment analysis reveals that presidents generally follow a positive-neutral-positive pattern when delivering the addresses and have similar opening and closing remarks. |
| Supervisor | Wittek, Mark; Savin, Ivan |
| Department | Network Science MSc |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/bektursyn_nurbek.pdf |
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