TY - JOUR
T1 - The language of politics
T2 - ideological differences in congressional communication on social media and the floor of Congress
AU - Jost, John T.
AU - Sterling, Joanna
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - Theory and research in political psychology, most of which is based on self-report studies of ordinary citizens, suggests that liberals and conservatives differ in terms of personality traits, value priorities, cognitive styles, and motivational tendencies. These psychological characteristics may be studied unobtrusively through the use of text analysis, which is especially valuable when it comes to investigating the characteristics of political elites, who are otherwise extremely difficult to study, despite their importance for understanding ideological dynamics. In the present research program we used Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software to analyze the language used by 279–388 members of the U.S. Congress on Twitter (n = 88,874 tweets), Facebook (n = 15,636 posts), and the floor of Congress (n = 6,159 speeches) over the same four-month period (February 9–May 28, 2014). Consistent with findings based on ordinary citizens, we observed that conservative legislators used more language pertaining to religion, power, threat, inhibition, risk and–on the floor of Congress–tradition and resistance to change. Conversely, liberal legislators used more language pertaining to affiliation, achievement, benevolence, emotion in general, ‘social’ concerns and–on the floor of Congress–universalism, stimulation, and hedonism. Implications for the study of political psycholinguistics focusing on ideological and contextual variability in communication patterns on various platforms are discussed, as are differences in language used by ordinary citizens and political elites.
AB - Theory and research in political psychology, most of which is based on self-report studies of ordinary citizens, suggests that liberals and conservatives differ in terms of personality traits, value priorities, cognitive styles, and motivational tendencies. These psychological characteristics may be studied unobtrusively through the use of text analysis, which is especially valuable when it comes to investigating the characteristics of political elites, who are otherwise extremely difficult to study, despite their importance for understanding ideological dynamics. In the present research program we used Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software to analyze the language used by 279–388 members of the U.S. Congress on Twitter (n = 88,874 tweets), Facebook (n = 15,636 posts), and the floor of Congress (n = 6,159 speeches) over the same four-month period (February 9–May 28, 2014). Consistent with findings based on ordinary citizens, we observed that conservative legislators used more language pertaining to religion, power, threat, inhibition, risk and–on the floor of Congress–tradition and resistance to change. Conversely, liberal legislators used more language pertaining to affiliation, achievement, benevolence, emotion in general, ‘social’ concerns and–on the floor of Congress–universalism, stimulation, and hedonism. Implications for the study of political psycholinguistics focusing on ideological and contextual variability in communication patterns on various platforms are discussed, as are differences in language used by ordinary citizens and political elites.
KW - Language
KW - political ideology; U.S. Congress
KW - social media
KW - text analysis
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U2 - 10.1080/15534510.2020.1871403
DO - 10.1080/15534510.2020.1871403
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85099602076
SN - 1553-4510
VL - 15
SP - 80
EP - 103
JO - Social Influence
JF - Social Influence
IS - 2-4
ER -