The Politics of Right and Wrong: Moral Appeals in Political Communication over Six Decades in Ten Western Democracies
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When politics is seen in a moral light, it fundamentally changes the terms of the game. Yet,while research has demonstrated the mobilizing, polarizing, and radicalizing consequences of moralization, we still lack elemental knowledge about how moral appeals are used by political elites. To answer unresolved questions about the temporal, ideological, and topical variation in moralization cross-nationally, we develop a novel multilingual transformer model and analyse a large corpus of political text from ten Western democracies over six decades. We show, first, that the moralization of politics has increased significantly over the past sixty years; second, that the tendency to moralize is not ideologically patterned; and third, that presumably ‘moral’ and ‘non-moral’ topics can be equally framed in moral terms. These findings have important implications for understanding political moralization processes by showing that morality is a dynamic rhetorical tool rather than a fixed and stable property of political communication.