Emotion in British politics – a mixed methods analysis of Conservative and Labour Party speeches from 1900–2019

Abstract

In recent years, an increasing ‘emotionality’ in Britain’s political discourse has been attested by many researchers and public commentators alike, regularly accusing alleged modern-day ‘populists’ of having caused this emotionalization with their unusual conduct and rhetoric. In these analyses, however, emotional speech is too often conflated with ‘populist’ speech, without offering substantial historical proof to support such claims. To scrutinize this alleged novel emotionalization of the general political discourse in Britain and to historically contextualize the influence that alleged ‘populists’ have had on it, I conducted a comparative, sequential mixed methods study of political speeches from British Labour and Conservative Party leaders (quant → QUAL), performing a manual neopragmatist discourse analysis as well as an automated dictionary analysis. With this approach, I was able to determine the distinct argumentative characteristics of the speeches and explore the discourses’ emotional quality, reporting a multitude of qualitative and quantitative differences as well as similarities between the two parties. Thus, the paper offers a (historical) overview of the general employment of emotion within political speech and consequently, argumentation used by British politicians. These findings are then used to contextualize claims about the influence that alleged ‘populists’ have had on the emotionality of recent politics.