Audio Data in Populist Political Speakers’ Use of Emotion

• In Event: New Approaches to Measuring Emotions

Abstract

Do politicians on the ideological fringes more commonly use emotional activation, negativity, and specific negative emotions such as fear and anger, compared to their non-populist counterparts? Populist politicians are defined as those not holding conventional center-left or center-right policy bundles (Gidron 2016). The analysis consists of measuring audio features in a dataset of 1579 systematically sampled videos of politicians speaking in the Canadian House of Commons, as well as paired comparisons of high-profile individual speakers from the UK House of Commons. Audio features are considered in connection to linguistic measures of emotional word use, and multi-coder or single-coder tags of the speaker’s perceived emotional state.

Methodological issues addressed include artifacts relevant to audio data analysis in political science, such as speakers triggering cues for emotional activation (Dietrich et al. 2019) when switching languages. Preliminary findings suggest that the ideological left in Canada and the UK tends to be more negative and more emotionally activated than the center-left, and that the same pattern may exist for the more extreme right, when compared to the center-right.

The research is beneficial to our understandings of political communication and representation because relatively new tools for audio analysis, adapted from fields such as phonetics and psychology, allow for the systematic testing of commonly held beliefs and scientific claims made about ‘populist’ or ideologically fringe speakers.

Author

• Catherine Moez, Centre for the Politics of Feelings, University of London