Join us for a talk by Tobias Widman from Department of Political Science at Aarhus University, Denmark, on the hyper-moralisation of contemporary politics. This is part of the Data Science Brown Bag series.
Abstract from the speaker:
Pundits and scholars alike argue that the contemporary period is hyper-moralized: Politicians increasingly make appeals to moral, that is, black-and-white thinking, drawing sharp distinctions between what is right and what is wrong. The activation of moral judgment is considered a central driver of polarization and division; however, despite its implications for understanding contemporary democratic challenges, there is a lack of academic work documenting politicians’ moral rhetoric. We analyse moral language in a large corpus of political text from ten Western democracies over six decades. Employing a novel multilingual transformer model to detect moral language in political communication, our analysis offers unique cross-national insights into variation in politicians’ use of moral appeals over time, and across countries, political ideology, and political topics. The results have implications for theoretical and empirical debates about morality, including whether it is a fixed and stable property of political communication or a dynamic rhetorical tool.
Bring your own lunch bag! Light pastries and drinks will be available in case you forget to bring it.
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The Data Science Brown Bag Series is an informal and interactive gathering where participants bring their own brown bag lunch and engage in discussions on research and insights the field of data and computational social science (light pastries and drinks will be available if you forget your lunch bag!).
The series provides a platform for data enthusiasts, researchers, and practitioners to share their experiences, best practices, and emerging methodologies and research in using data science to analyze and understand social and political phenomena. The brown bag talk series is for anyone interested in data science and social science to network, learn, and share ideas in a casual and friendly setting.
