Moral-Language Use by U.S. Political Elites

Abstract

We used a distributed-language model to examine the moral language employed by U.S. political elites. In Study 1, we analyzed 687,360 Twitter messages (tweets) posted by accounts belonging to Democratic and Republican members of Congress from 2016 to 2018. In Study 2, we analyzed 2,630,688 speeches given on the floor of the House and Senate from 1981 to 2017. We found that partisan differences in moral-language use shifted over time as the parties gained or lost political power. Overall, lower political power was associated with greater use of moral language for both Democrats and Republicans. On Twitter, Democrats used more moral language in the period after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election. In Congressional transcripts, both Democrats and Republicans used more of most kinds of moral language when they were in the minority.