What makes political discourse emotional, and how do we know?
The role emotions play in influencing political attitudes, decisions, and behaviour has been increasingly recognised in research across the social sciences. However, identifying political emotions remains a major methodological challenge. This talk will present some of the results of a project involving an interdisciplinary consortium created to study and empirically measure moral emotions in public policy and politics.
The project, called MORES, is funded by the Horizon programme of the European Commission. In this talk, the consortium leader, Professor Zsolt Boda, will focus on a tool generated by the project, called MoresPulse. This is a theory-based, expert-trained, human-evaluated and freely available LLM-based tool made with XLM-RoBERTa that identifies the textual manifestation of basic emotions in multiple European languages. MoresPulse also draws on the results of a longitudinal text mining analysis conducted with it on the corpus of Hungarian parliamentary speeches from 1998 to 2022.
The talk will address the following questions: is it true that the emotionalisation of political discourse is on the rise? What are the most commonly used political emotions? What are the factors behind the increased emotionalisation of political discourse? Are there differences between policy fields? Does the saliency of a topic contribute to its emotionalisation? Do the discourses of parties from different party families exhibit different patterns of emotionalisation?
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