Tone in politics is not systematically related to macro trends, ideology, or experience

Christian Pipal; Bert N. Bakker; Gijs Schumacher; Mariken A.C.G. van der Velden

doi:10.1038/s41598-023-49618-9

Tone in politics is not systematically related to macro trends, ideology, or experience

Christian Pipal^*, Bert N. Bakker, Gijs Schumacher, Mariken A.C.G. van der Velden

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article › Academic › peer-review

Abstract

What explains the variation in tone in politics? Different literatures argue that changes in the tone of politicians reflect changes in the economy, general language, well-being, or ideology. So far, these claims have been empirically tested only in isolation, in single country studies, or with a small subset of indicators. We offer an overarching view by modelling the use of tone in European national parliaments in 7 countries across 30 years. Using a semi-supervised sentiment-topic model to measure polarity and arousal in legislative debates, we show in a preregistered multiverse analysis that the tone in legislative debates is not systematically related to previously claimed factors. We also replicate the absence of such systematic relationships using national leader speeches and parties’ election manifestos. There is also no universal trend towards more negativity or emotionality in political language. Overall, our results highlight the importance of multi-lingual and cross-country multiverse analyses for generalizing findings on emotions in politics.

Original language	English
Article number	3241
Pages (from-to)	1-14
Number of pages	14
Journal	Scientific Reports
Volume	14
Early online date	8 Feb 2024
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-49618-9
Publication status	Published - 2024

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2024.

Funding

Pipal and Schumacher received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 759079, POLEMIC. We would like to thank Lea Kaftan, Hauke Licht, and the members of the Hot Politics Lab for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. Our work also benefited from the feedback received during presentations at MPSA 2022, the Zurich Text-as-Data workshop, COMPTEXT 2022, and Hot Politics Lab meetings at the University of Amsterdam. We thank the audiences at these events for their valuable insights. We are also thankful to the reviewers at Scientific Reports, including Stuart Soroka and one anonymous reviewer, whose comments have significantly strengthened the manuscript.

Funders	Funder number
Hauke Licht
Hot Politics Lab meetings
Lea Kaftan
Stuart Soroka
Horizon 2020 Framework Programme	759079
European Research Council

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Tone in politics is not systematically related to macro trends, ideology, or experience

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