(Press-News.org) Politicians use emotional resources in their speeches in parliament depending on the type of debate and use emotive rhetoric strategically and selectively, mainly to attract voters. This is one of the main conclusions of a study published in the journal American Political Science Review (APSR) involving Toni Rodon, a professor with the UPF Department of Political and Social Sciences and member of the Research Group on Institutions and Political Actors, together with Moritz Osnabrügge (Durham University, as first author) and Sara B. Hobolt (London School of Economics and Political Science).
"Our research provides evidence that incentives to attract voters differ systematically depending on the type of debate"
In recent years, much research has been done showing that emotions are important in politics and that the use of emotive rhetoric, based on positive or negative language, is common during election campaigns. Research has also been conducted within political parties regarding the stance adopted and the dissent expressed in parliamentary debates, but when and why politicians use emotive rhetoric in their legislative speeches has been studied less, and is now elaborated on by the authors in their work.
Emotive language usually refers to a style of communication that arouses an emotional response from the listener, thus evoking positive or negative reactions that go beyond the specific meaning of the word or phrase used. So, it can be a powerful tool to convince people of the validity of a particular message, and from the point of view of electoral competition, there is evidence linking emotion-eliciting appeals with the electoral success of certain political formations.
Analysis of two million speeches in the House of Commons and in the Dáil Éireann
The analysis included in article covers two million speeches delivered in the House of Commons and in the Dáil Éireann, the lower houses of parliament of Great Britain and Ireland, respectively. Specifically, a million parliamentary speeches, i.e., all those that were delivered in the House of Commons between 2001 and 2019, and a further one million speeches delivered in the Dáil Éireann between 2002 and 2013.
The authors chose the British Parliament because it is one of the oldest in the world, an ideal institutional environment for studying these kinds of speeches. "We focused on the House of Commons because it is the more powerful of the two legislative chambers in the UK and the debates held there differ in terms of their profile and the size of the audience, which has allowed us to compare emotive rhetoric across different types of debate", the authors assert. In a second stage, the study of the speeches delivered in the lower house of the Irish parliament has allowed confirming and generalizing their findings.
High and low profile legislative debates: two different styles of discourse
The article which, based on an analysis of how politicians use emotive rhetoric in parliament, contributes to the understanding of political competition and legislative behaviour, underlines differences with regard to incentives that legislators have according to the type of debate. "Our research provides evidence that incentives to attract voters differ systematically depending on the type of debate", the authors suggest. Thus, in high-profile legislative debates, parliamentarians have more incentives to use emotive rhetoric to attract the attention of a wider audience, which they capture by using more emotive political content and language.
It could be said that PMQs is the debate to which citizens are most exposed, and this gives incentives for MPs to use more emotive language.
In the House of Commons, this is the case of Prime Minister's Questions (PMQs), a debate held weekly. It is a convention during which the prime minister answers questions from MPs, especially the leader of the opposition. It is the parliamentary highlight of the week, broadcast live and covered extensively by the media.
It could be said that PMQs is the debate to which citizens are most exposed, and this gives incentives for MPs to use more emotive language. Other high-profile debates are the Queen's Speech, which take place annually at the start of each new year of parliament (at which the Queen reads the government's main priorities, and which also involves the prime minister and the opposition leader) or the Dáil Leaders' Questions, which are put to the Irish prime minister.
Conversely, in low-profile legislative debates, which are not so avidly followed and generate less expectation, politicians mostly address their colleagues in parliament, and therefore emotional rhetoric is less pronounced.
A new application to measure emotive rhetoric
The study presents a new methodological application to measure emotive rhetoric, and it does so by combining the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) dictionary, with word-embedding techniques that enables creating a dictionary specific to the field. Thus, the new tool categorizes emotional and neutral words via ANEW and also identifies new words used in parliamentary speeches to broaden these two categories.
Word Clouds of Emotive and Neutral Words
For example, some of the neutral words incorporated by the authors are "walkway", "diameter", "metres" and "radiators" and some of the emotional words, "appalling", "empathy", "horrific" and "admiration". With regard to areas where we find a higher average level of emotive rhetoric there is "fabric of society", "social groups" and "welfare and quality of life", and the areas where we find a lower level of emotive rhetoric, "political system" and "economy". "Our measurement technique more accurately captures the emotive use of language in a political environment", the researchers assert.
The authors conclude their work with a reminder: although emotive parliamentary speeches may have positive implications, with increased public interest in the activities of their representatives and in politics in general, there is the risk of negative consequences: "Emotive rhetoric may also increase polarization and may favour politicians who prioritize emotional appeals over competent, coherent policy, and can harm the quality of deliberation and at the same time the quality of democratic representation", they warn.
INFORMATION:
Reference work: Osnabrügge, M., Hobolt, S.B., Rodon, T. "Playing to the Gallery: Emotive Rhetoric in Parliaments" (May 2021). American Political Science Review (pp. 1-15) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055421000356
Domestic burning of wood and dung fuels in Neolithic homes would have exceeded modern internationally-agreed standards for indoor air quality, exposing inhabitants to unsafe levels of particulates.
Working with environmental engineers, archaeologists at Newcastle University, UK, used modern air quality monitoring methods to assess the impact of domestic fuel burning inside buildings at Çatalhöyük, in Turkey, one of the world's earliest settlements.
A typical house at Çatalhöyük, a UNESCO World Heritage site, had a domed oven set against the south wall, located beneath an opening in the roof. In the 1990s, a replica of one of these houses ...
Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are highly reactive chemicals which contain oxygen radicals. Hypochlorous acid, peroxides, superoxide, singlet oxygen, alpha-oxygen and hydroxyl radicals are the major examples of ROS, which are familiar to persons from many walks of life as they are used in many domestic and industrial processes. ROS are naturally produced during a variety of biochemical reactions within the cell organelles such as the endoplasmic reticulum, mitochondria and peroxisomes. ROS are also formed as a byproduct of the normal metabolism of oxygen. The production of ROS can be induced by various factors such as heavy metals, tobacco, smoke, drugs, xenobiotics, pollutants and radiation. From various experimental studies, it is reported that ROS acts as either tumor suppressing or tumor ...
Malaria still kills millions. Researchers are excited by a new intervention: giving people a drug which kills mosquitoes that bite them. Incredibly, this is a reality, as the drug ivermectin, widely used for the control of parasite infections such as lymphatic filariasis and onchocerciasis, appears to do this. With some mosquitoes now resistant to the insecticides used in treated bed nets, this is a potentially important new control measure.
LSTM's Dr Rebecca Thomas and Dr Joseph Okebe, together with Dr de Souza from the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research (NMIMR(link is external)), University of Ghana, first examined the experimental evidence that giving the drug to people kills the mosquitoes that bite them.
All included studies showed large effects of ivermectin on ...
Predicting the potential effects of coral loss on fish communities globally is a fundamental task, especially considering that reef fishes provide protein to millions of people. A new study led by the University of Helsinki predicts how fish diversity will respond to declines in coral diversity and shows that future coral loss might cause a more than 40% reduction in reef fish diversity globally.
Corals increasingly bleach and often die when the water warms. What happens to fish if there are no alternative reefs to swim to? The few fish species that feed on corals will inevitably starve, but the rest might find alternative rocky habitat to persist. As yet, it has been hard to ...
By the beginning of April 2021, the number of people infected during the COVID-19 pandemic had risen to more than 130 million people of whom more than 2.8 million died. The SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for COVID-19 is transmitted particularly by droplets or aerosols emitted when an infected person speaks, sneezes or coughs. This is how the viruses and other pathogens spread through the environment and transmit infectious diseases when they are inhaled by someone else.
The capacity of these particles to remain suspended in the air and to spread in the environment depends largely on the size and nature of the air flow generated by the expiration of air. As with other airborne infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, common flu ...
Significantly higher rates of child intensive care admissions for unintentional cannabis poisonings have been seen following legalization of the drug in Canada.
Researchers from The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), based in Toronto, found a four-fold increase in unintentional poisonings in children under the age of 12 and a three-fold increase in intensive care admissions for severe cannabis poisoning in the first two years following cannabis legalization.
However, the overall number of visits per month for cannabis intoxications to the SickKids Emergency Department (ED) remained consistent when comparing the pre- and post-legalization ...
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have upgraded their laser frequency-comb instrument to simultaneously measure three airborne greenhouse gases -- nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide and water vapor -- plus the major air pollutants ozone and carbon monoxide.
Combined with an earlier version of the system that measures methane, NIST's dual comb technology can now sense all four primary greenhouse gases, which could help in understanding and monitoring emissions of these heat-trapping gases implicated in climate change. The newest comb system can also help assess urban air quality.
These NIST instruments identify gas signatures by precisely measuring the amounts of light ...
A McGill-led study has shown that the size of the Maya population in the lowland city of Itzan (in present-day Guatemala) varied over time in response to climate change. The findings, published recently in Quaternary Science Reviews, show that both droughts and very wet periods led to important population declines.
These results are based on using a relatively new technique involving looking at stanols (organic molecules found in human and animal faecal matter) taken from the bottom of a nearby lake. Measurements of stanols were used to estimate changes in population size and to examine how they align with information about climate variability and changes in vegetation drawn from other biological and archaeological sources.
By using the technique, the researchers were able ...
Increasing our understanding of cellular processes requires information about the types of biomolecules involved, their locations, and their interactions. This requires the molecules to be labeled without affecting physiological processes (bioorthogonality). This works when the markers are very quickly and selectively coupled using small molecules and "click chemistry". In the journal Angewandte Chemie, a team of researchers has now introduced a novel type of click reaction that is also suitable for living cells and organisms.
As an example, labeling biomolecules allows for the localization and characterization of tumors ...
A new Finnish study shows that 180 health care workers who had received two doses of the Pfizer and Biontech vaccine have very good antibody responses against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The immune response was as strong against the alpha variant (formerly the UK variant) but was somewhat decreased against the beta variant (formerly the South Africa variant).
Finnish researchers from the University of Turku and University of Helsinki together with Turku University Hospital, Helsinki University Hospital, and the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare studied the immune response induced by the coronavirus vaccinations, which started in Finland in December. The researchers analysed vaccine responses ...
