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Playing to the Gallery: Emotive Rhetoric in Parliaments

Osnabrügge, Moritz; Hobolt, Sara B.; Rodon, Toni

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Authors

Sara B. Hobolt

Toni Rodon



Abstract

Research has shown that emotions matter in politics, but we know less about when and why politicians use emotive rhetoric in the legislative arena. This article argues that emotive rhetoric is one of the tools politicians can use strategically to appeal to voters. Consequently, we expect that legislators are more likely to use emotive rhetoric in debates that have a large general audience. Our analysis covers two million parliamentary speeches held in the UK House of Commons and the Irish Parliament. We use a dictionary-based method to measure emotive rhetoric, combining the Affective Norms for English Words dictionary with word-embedding techniques to create a domain-specific dictionary. We show that emotive rhetoric is more pronounced in high-profile legislative debates, such as Prime Minister’s Questions. These findings contribute to the study of legislative speech and political representation by suggesting that emotive rhetoric is used by legislators to appeal directly to voters.

Citation

Osnabrügge, M., Hobolt, S. B., & Rodon, T. (2021). Playing to the Gallery: Emotive Rhetoric in Parliaments. American Political Science Review, 115(3), 885-899. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0003055421000356

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Apr 14, 2021
Online Publication Date May 24, 2021
Publication Date 2021-08
Deposit Date Jul 16, 2021
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal American Political Science Review
Print ISSN 0003-0554
Electronic ISSN 1537-5943
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 115
Issue 3
Pages 885-899
DOI https://doi.org/10.1017/s0003055421000356

Files

Published Journal Article (Advance Online Version) (1.4 Mb)
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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
Advance Online Version This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association




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