Who Hedges; Who Declares? Certainty in Ireland & UK Parliamentary Debates

• In Event: Eleventy Million Observations: Applications in Text Analysis & Machine Learning

Abstract

Campaign speeches and parliamentary debates cater to different audiences and subsequently have distinct purposes. During campaigns, directed at the public, politicians express high attitude certainty to signal competence and credibility and attract voters.
Once elected, legislators find themselves in a double bind: speaking with certainty asserts their argument but conveying a level of uncertainty may foster persuasion and compromise among fellow parliamentarians. When addressing one's peers, do some MPs hedge and others declare? Using the LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) dictionary, coupled with machine learning, we measure levels of certainty and tentativeness in over 3 million parliamentary speeches in the UK House of Commons (1988 – 2015) and the Irish Dáil Éireann (1995 – 2013).
Because there are individual differences in the tendency to express certainty, we specifically investigate effects based on gender, experience, and ideological position. In our pre-registered hypotheses, we expect that male MPs and MPs who have been in office longer express higher levels of certainty than female MPs and political newcomers, respectively. When combined, we anticipate that the gender gap in expressed certainty will narrow over the course of political careers. We also include some exploratory analyses to test whether there are right-left party differences in certainty speech and if this varies by issues typically "owned" by the parties.

Authors

• Amanda Friesen, Western University

• Mariken van der Velden, Free University Amsterdam

• Isabella Rebasso, University of Amsterdam