Introducing the United States Secretary of State (USSOS) Speech Dataset

Abstract

A large number of theories in international relations attribute importance to the rhetoric of leading foreign policy actors. Moreover, in recent years, there has been a significant growth in interest for producing machine-readable text of remarks from key foreign policy actors. Yet, researchers have, to date, focused primarily on the rhetoric of executive leaders and members of legislatures. To understand the construction of foreign policy in the public arena and dynamics in it, especially in the United States, we need a collection of fine-grained textual representation of the remarks of US Secretaries of State. An especially promising use for such a corpus of text is to measure attention areas in US foreign policy and its implication for the US's policies, including in foreign aid. In this note, We introduce the United States Secretary of State Dataset, a corpus of 17,700 remarks delivered by US Secretaries of State from 1997 to 2026. Using this dataset, we demonstrate that Secretaries of State frequently make public remarks, the likes of which can have substantively meaningful implications.