By Prinz Magtulis
June 30, 2023
Actions speak louder than words, or
so the cliche goes, but that is not the case when you are president
when everything you say carries the weight of power and authority.
This power is amplified every fourth Monday of July when the president
delivers the State of the Nation Address (SONA). Under the
Constitution, the SONA opens a new session of Congress, but in
reality, it is a yearly spectacle where lawmakers in their formal
attire arrive to a red carpet at the House of Representatives to
listen to the president, who speaks for hours behind a lectern.
An analysis of the SONA from the Philippine Commonwealth showed that
this annual presidential speech contains an average of over 7,600
words, which takes approximately about an hour to deliver. It tends to
be heavily interrupted by applause from a live audience that includes
foreign dignitaries, and can cover a wide spectrum of topics from the
government's socioeconomic agenda to jokes, both the good and
bad ones, all dependent on the whim of the president.
The SONA has no time limit, so some speak more than the others:
Rodrigo Duterte holds the record of having the longest SONA among all
Philippine leaders post-dictatorship. The current president, Ferdinand
“Bongbong” Marcos Jr., delivered his first SONA using 7,990 words,
running an hour and 10 minutes in 2022.
Marcos Sr. spoke the longest, Arroyo shortest
Word count of the text of the State of the Nation Address by
Philippine presidents, arranged by succession
Shortest SONA was in 2005 with 1,590 words
But speech length is just one aspect of it. Charles Ladia, a professor
who studies political communication at University of the Philippines,
said some words carry more weight than others. Context is important as
like any other speeches, the SONA is delivered with a political
objective. This can be anything from pleading legislators for support
to their agenda, diffusing tensions, or salvaging a waning political
capital halfway through their six-year term.
"It is, of course, an agenda-setting speech," Manuel Quezon III, a
historian and grandson of a former president, said. "So it must inform
and then muster support."
The president also delivers the SONA before the Executive department
submits its proposed budget to Congress. Under the charter, the budget
should be submitted within 30 days from the SONA, making the speech a
"sales pitch" of the president to legislators, the first chance to
sell to Congress government programs for public funding.
This pitch generally looked and sounded the same through the years.
SONA, after all, is historically a formal event, Ladia said. Most
presidents spoke in English. Our analysis showed that some of the most
common words that appeared in the SONA were "government," "people,"
"program," "congress", "time", and "development".
What presidents typically say
'Government', 'national', and 'development' are some of the most
common words included in State of the Nation Address.
However, how these words were used varied in context. For instance,
saying "government" may either refer to the present or past
administrations, especially for speeches that tend to highlight
differences among past and present governments. A
study, meanwhile, found that the frequent use of "development" implied
that SONA traditionally "focused on the growth of the country"
("economic" is also often used), while "people" showed that presidents
tried to portray they are addressing the people's needs.
That said, the same words could also be so generic, their frequent
mention hardly meant anything relevant. To go deeper then, our
analysis ran an algorithm that weighed how many times a word appeared
on the document against the number of times these words appeared in a
president's set of speeches. This statistical method is known as
term frequency and inverse document frequency (TF-IDF).
Political messages were all over SONA. The late Benigno Aquino III had
"Kayo ang boss ko (You are my bosses)" in 2010, referring to Filipinos
and how he was accountable to them. "Wang-wang" also became a buzzword
of his anti-corruption platform. A Filipino slang for a vehicle siren,
Aquino in 2011 likened "wang-wang" on the road to government officials
using their position to take advantage of the public.
Fidel Ramos went beyond political messaging and in 1993 launched
"Philippines 2000" in his SONA, a socioeconomic program that opened
the country's industries to foreign business. SONA was not only a
venue to introduce new policies, but also to defend existing ones such
as the expanded Value-Added Tax (VAT) law under Arroyo, and Duterte on
his drug war – both of which were assesed to be relevant themes of
their speeches.
Presidents also tackled the "crisis" that faced the nation such as
"SARS" or the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome in 2003 and most
recently, "Covid" or the "pandemic" from 2020 to 2021. The abduction
by of Angelo de la Cruz, an overseas Filipino worker in Afghanistan in
2004, was also a political crisis that Arroyo addressed in her
38-minute speech to Congress at the time.
Arroyo, who dogged a number of political controversies as president,
delivered the shortest SONA so far, which ran for about 25 minutes.
Quezon said this was intentional. "They pruned down her SONAs as the
main point of them was not their contents, but her ability to survive
to deliver them at all," he said. She acknowledged her "critics" in
her last SONA when our analysis showed, other presidents would spend
their longest time speaking to dangle their achievements, Ladia said.
At the same time, presidents also used their time behind the lectern
to go on the offensive. Estrada waged an all-out war against the Moro
Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in Mindanao in 2000 (both "MILF" and
"Mindanao" were among the more relevant words found in his speech
then). Aquino blasted the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System
for excessive bonuses of its officials, and Duterte criticized the
"oligarchy".
What words matter in the SONA
Presidents use their annual SONA to launch or defend their
government's agenda, push for a political message, and even attack
or address their critics.
poverty - Estrada ran on a
campaign that promised to eradicate poverty.
Mindanao- Estrada declared an
all-out war against communist rebels in Mindanao.
poverty - Estrada ran on a
campaign that promised to eradicate poverty.
Mindanao- Estrada declared an
all-out war against communist rebels in Mindanao.
Mindanao- Estrada declared an
all-out war against communist rebels in Mindanao.
poverty - Estrada ran on a
campaign to eradicate poverty.
Note: Speeches are arranged chronologically. Headers and stopwords
were disregarded.
Source: Official Gazette
These specific themes do not just accidentally land in the SONA.
Months before the president delivers the address, the Office of the
President gathers inputs from various government agencies to include
in the draft of the speech. Not all get to the final version of the
SONA, and presidents may even divert from the actual text while
speaking. This was mostly the case for Duterte.
Duterte was fond of giving off-the-cuff remarks, and when he did, he
uttered words that dictated the theme of his SONA – and policy. When
he called out the so-called "oligarchy" in Philippine business in
2020, it did not matter that the meaning of the word was not clarified
or defined. Cleve Arguelles, a political scientist at De La Salle
University, said what mattered was the president was understood by
"his own audience", people attracted to his brand of politics as being
one with the masses.
In that SONA, he also doubled down on his attacks against broadcaster
ABS-CBN Corp. The network caught Duterte's ire early on his term in
2016, and eventually lost its broadcasting franchise after Congress
opted not to renew it in 2020. Duterte likewise attacked the mining
industry in 2017, as well as the so-called "elite". He was one of the
only three presidents who called out the "elite" in their SONA, apart
from Estrada and Marcos Sr.
Calling out the 'elite'
Three Philippine presidents have criticized the so-called "elites"
for their supposed power and influence in the country.
Duterte, who ran and won on a platform to supposedly end the dominance
of "Imperial Manila," also "code switched" to Bisaya, the language in
his hometown Davao. "The imagined relationship between Duterte and
Filipinos is informal, personal, and even unmediated," Arguelles said.
Under Marcos Jr., the formal tone of the SONA returned last year, but
Ladia said so far, his speech "lacked rhetorical power." His last SONA
instead was highly leveraged on data, and no specific themes were
prevalent, whether in his government's agenda or how he intended to
address specific issues such as rising commodity prices. His most
relevant words were "government" and "department", our analysis
showed, which by themselves hardly meant anything significant.
Ladia said this could be a political strategy: by not directly
addressing issues in his public appearances, Marcos gives less chance
for critics to attack him. "It's like the less you talk, the less
mistakes you commit," he said.
This is where his supporters, especially in social media, enter. By
giving broad strokes in his SONA, Ladia said Marcos's supporters get
to easily pass their interpretation of the president's statements that
would fit their own narrative. They become a "mouthpiece" of the
administration, while also attacking critics of the SONA for
supposedly "twisting the president's words," Ladia said.
The Palace said Marcos will present "progress" his administration made
in his next SONA on July 24. So far, the majority of Filipinos think
he is doing a good job: 78% of respondents approved of Marcos's
performance in the March survey of pollster Pulse Asia.
"He's letting things pass, which is sad but it is working for him,"
Ladia said.
With thanks to Dhrumil Mehta and Clare Trainor for data and visuals
suggestions and edits. Process and details of the analysis is
available in
our Github repository, although the same is subject to update to include new findings
that were included in the story.
