The Politics of Right and Wrong: Moral Appeals in Political Communication over Six Decades in Ten Western Democracies

Abstract

Recent research has shed light on the potentially polarizing and radicalizing consequences of heightening moral concerns in politics. Yet, despite the serious implications for the health of democracy, we know surprisingly little about the political room for manoeuvre in the moral domain. We identify three unresolved questions concerning the political uses of morality and employ a novel multilingual transformer model in a large corpus of political text from ten Western democracies over six decades to answer them. We show, first, that political parties have increased their use of moral appeals over time; second, that the tendency to moralize is not ideologically patterned; and third, that there is considerable variation over time in the degree to which presumably ‘moral’ and ‘non-moral’ topics are cast in moral language. These results show that morality is a dynamic rhetorical tool rather than a fixed and stable property of political communication.