Moral Foundations of Political Discourse: Comparative Analysis of the Speech Records of the US Congress and the Japanese Diet

TL;DR

This study compares the moral and emotional structures of political discourse in the US Congress and Japanese Diet using extensive text analysis, revealing cross-national differences and challenging existing moral foundation theories.

Contribution

It provides a cross-cultural analysis of political speech, employing large-scale data and dictionary-based sentiment and moral analysis to uncover new patterns.

Findings

Cross-national differences in moral-emotional frameworks

Challenges to Haidt's moral foundation hypothesis

Intriguing patterns in parliamentary deliberations

Abstract

There has been a growing body of study on the relationship between public/political discourse and its moral-emotional foundations. Most of the studies, however, have been confined to a single country's context, lacking cross-cultural perspectives. Taking a comparative perspective, we examined the emotional and moral structures of political and public discussion observed in the U.S. and Japan by employing extensive text data that cover these two countries. Specifically, we conducted dictionary-based sentiment and moral analyses of floor debate in the U.S. Congress and the Japanese Diet over a long period of time. The analyses revealed intriguing cross-national patterns in the moral-emotional framework employed in parliamentary deliberations, which cast doubt on some of the dominant arguments in the field, including, among others, J. Haidt's moral foundation hypothesis.