Translating Partisan Cues: Does Language Moderate Framing Effects?

• In Event: Framing Effects in the News

Abstract

American candidates for political office must increasingly appeal to multilingual constituents. To reach likely Latino voters crafting dual English- and Spanish-language campaigns is essential. Although microtargeting has traditionally been used in electoral outreach, the scale and purview of this particular language-based mode of political messaging is unprecedented. Choosing to speak in Spanish has clear political consequences. However, it remains unclear how well these meticulously curated rhetorical strategies are communicated in Spanish or whether there are limits to or contraventions of their persuasive capacity when you vary the language. Existing research on language effects in opinion formation finds that these cross-linguistic appeals can influence political attitudes by priming and reinforcing social identities. When candidates do create ads in Spanish, this linguistic decision is used by voters to make inferences about their political priorities and informs a far-reaching electoral calculation. Yet, canonical research in psycholinguistics challenges these expectations about the way multilingual political communication is supposed to work and suggests that opinion formation and political deliberation may be language specific or that the accessibility of certain campaign rhetoric could be contingent on a particular (English) linguistic environment. Adjudicating between these competing hypotheses about the nature and limits of cross-linguistic political appeals, this study finds that varying the language of communication does have an effect on certain types of political speech. When the message contains a term, idiom, or phrase whose persuasive impact is premised on its syntax, seeing it in Spanish mediates its political punch or obscures the intended reference. The term “welfare”, for example, produced a qualitatively different response, resulting in contrasting levels of support for public assistance programs among bilinguals when communicated in English versus Spanish. Because content is held constant, these differences in response or sensitivities to framing attempts are attributable to the linguistic intervention. Markedly, the study finds that these language effects are not due to a language barrier. These results enumerate and reveal the considerable risk to campaign efforts when candidates choose to carry their political or rhetorical brand across linguistic contexts, and moreover, they localize where such transformative language effects are most likely. This experiment broadens the scope of what is considered part of learned or acquired political behavior, describing a form of ongoing lexical conditioning whereby familiarity with a political vocabulary arises over time, termed here as political-lexical acculturation. This study suggests each time candidates make a multilingual appeal, they add to and further develop a language-specific political vernacular and through repeated exposure the intended conceptual links between languages coalesce.

Author

• Alejandro Flores, University of Chicago