“Radicals” and “Racists”: Morality and Identity in U.S. Elite Political Communication

Abstract

This study examines how elite political and media actors strategically leverage moral claims for partisan ends, transforming political identities, issues, and campaigns into zero-sum moral contests against their opposition. Here, I develop a framework for and approach to the study of morality as a strategic and identity-based tool in political communication, in the process developing a way of studying powerful and pervasive forms of political discourse often overlooked by scholarship. I show how partisan actors have identity-based motivations for employing particular forms of moral political communication, including religious, social, and civic morality. I then apply this framework to the case of the U.S. 2020 election, conducting context-sensitive computational and qualitative content analyses of elite political communication across political talk shows, op-eds, and campaign Twitter discourse. Results reveal the pervasive nature of moral political communication in these spaces. This work shows how, as U.S. political parties increasingly represent divergent and less cross-cutting groups of people, elite actors draw upon moral claims to attract and perform for particular ideological, religious, racial, and ethnic identity coalitions—often drawing from the same moral vocabulary to articulate opposing visions of democracy and civic life.