Power and Positivity: Psycholinguistic Perspectives on Word Valence in Canadian Parliament

Jordan Gallant,Gary Libben

doi:10.3389/fcomm.2021.770497

Abstract

Politicians are skilled language users who deploy words strategically and pay close attention to the emotions that those words evoke. We examined the emotional characteristics of over 92 million words spoken by Canadian Members of Parliament between 2006 and 2021. The analysis brought together the Warriner, Kuperman, and Brysbaert (Behav. Res., 2013, 45, 1191–1207) database of valence (positivity) ratings for English and the Canadian Hansard, which contains a transcription of parliamentary speech. Results revealed that the positivity of words used by politicians in parliament was significantly related to both political and social variables. Politicians increased the positivity of their language after the onset of the COVID-19 crisis. Within the time of the crisis, word positivity was linked statistically to month-by-month case counts, indicating a very fine-grained sensitivity to social realities. Our analysis also revealed a fine-grained sensitivity of word valence to political realities. As expected, parties in power used more positive language than those in opposition. In addition, our analysis revealed that individual parties have characteristic levels of word positivity and that those levels change in accordance with political changes as specific as whether or not the party in power holds a majority of seats in parliament. These findings suggest that the emotional properties of words used by Members of Parliament are reliably indexed to sociopolitical dynamics. The findings also suggest that the methodology of linking individual word ratings to Hansard Documents (which are used to document Parliamentary activities in over 25 countries) can provide a key tool for the understanding of specific crises such as the COVID-19 global pandemic as well as more general social and political trends across countries and languages.

Highlights

Canada, like many other countries around the world, has a parliamentary system of government that has developed from the British style of government
The Hansard analysis that we report examined the speech of all five of the currently ‘represented’ Canadian political parties, i.e., the Bloc Québécois (BQ), the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC), the Green Party (GP), the Liberal Party of Canada (Lib), and the New Democratic Party (NDP)
We investigated the emotional properties of language used in the Canadian House of Commons debates over the past 15 years

Summary

Introduction

Like many other countries around the world, has a parliamentary system of government that has developed from the British (or Westminister) style of government. In the Canadian system, bills that are introduced in the House of Commons must be approved by the Senate and are signed into law after approval by the Governor General of Canada. This process is almost exclusively carried out through verbal means. The goal of our study was to examine this linguistic activity and, in particular, to investigate how the emotional characteristics of the words used by Canadian Members of Parliament reflect the political realities within parliament and the surrounding social context. Parliament remains fundamentally an institution of speech, carrying within it the Old French word parle-ment

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion