National political dialogue focused on power and morals

A study of political speeches, social media posts from politicians, and Reddit discussions among everyday users finds a higher prevalence of abstract, moralized, and power-centric language in national versus local politics. Political dialogue and debate in the United States has largely shifted from the local to the national in recent years, in part due to the decline of local news media. However, national discussions lack the concrete common ground that comes from shared place-based knowledge. Danica Dillion and colleagues studied how this shift is affecting political discourse by comparing speeches by city mayors to speeches by presidents, as well as comparing senator’s speeches given before versus after election to national office. The authors also compared the Twitter feeds of mayors to federal senators and conversations on Reddit about COVID in local city subreddits to those in national news subreddits. In each case, the authors looked for moral language using the extended Moral Foundations Dictionary, looked for power-centric language using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count summary algorithm, and looked for abstract language using a previously published lexicon. The authors also replicated their analyses using large language models to measure each of these constructs. Broadly, national conversations had a higher prevalence of abstract, moralized, and power-centric language. The authors note that people may be attempting to appeal to a heterogenous national audience with widely relevant themes such as morality and power. Additional analyses showed that online text with these features tended to attract more engagement but also provoked anger and negativity. According to the authors, the nationalization of American politics may be fueling partisan animosity. 

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