Candidates and Moral Rhetoric in Presidential Campaigns

• In Event: Improving Decision-Making

Abstract

Politics is generally about the authoritative allocation of values, with parties and candidates contesting over them. Existing research (Haidt and Grahm 2007) suggests that conservatives and liberals care differentially about moral foundations of care and fairness (for liberals) and authority, loyalty, and sanctity (for conservatives.) While studies show mixed results on the extent to which moral foundations are basic intuitions which people use to guide their sense of right and wrong, candidates clearly care about making moral appeals. Yet, there is little empirical research into the extent to which candidates appeal to moral foundations in their campaign speeches. Recent research has considered how candidates from the left and right respond to debate questions (Lewis 2019), but debates are only one way in which candidates communicate with voters. In this study, we examine a unique dataset of candidate speeches collected during the 2016 and 2020 Iowa Caucus campaigns. The dataset covers more than 30 candidates - both Republican and Democrat - with more than 100 speeches made at the very beginning of the race for U.S. President. Machine learning tools are used to analyze these speeches for the use of moral foundations language, and examine them for the sentiment of these references. Comparisons between Republicans and Democrats, and candidates within parties, are made. Results are combined with contextual and other data on candidate support during the Caucus campaigns to identify the role moral language plays in voter choice. Findings add to the initial work of Lewis (2019) on candidate debates and broaden our understanding of how candidates use this language in seeking voter support.

References:
Haidt, Jonathan, and Jesse Graham. 2007. When morality opposes justice: Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize. Social Justice Research 20: 98–116.

Lewis, Paul G. 2019. Moral Foundations in the 2015-16 U.S. Presidential Primary Debates: The Positive and Negative Moral Vocabulary of Partisan Elites. Social Sciences 8, 233. doi:10.3390/socsci8080233

Authors

• David P. Redlawsk, University of Delaware

• Jiwon Nam, University of Delaware