The Politics of Right and Wrong: Moral Appeals in Political Communication over Six Decades in Ten Western Democracies

When politics is seen in a moral light, it fundamentally changes the terms of the game:Moralization both mobilizes and polarizes, testifying to its potency as a political force. Yet, despite thewealth of evidence on the consequences of moralization, we still have limited insight into politicians’rhetorical use of moral appeals. This article empirically grounds existing theories by answering unresolvedquestions concerning the temporal, ideological, and topical variation in moral appeals cross-nationally.To do so, we develop a novel multilingual transformer model and analyse a large corpus of political textfrom ten Western democracies over six decades. We show, first, that political communication has becomeincreasingly moralized over the past sixty years; second, that the tendency to moralize does not follow aconsistent ideological pattern; and third, that presumably ‘moral’ and ‘non-moral’ topics can be equallyframed in moral terms. Together, these findings qualify our understanding of political moralization:Rather than a fixed and stable property of political communication, moral appeals are used by politiciansas a dynamic rhetorical tool.