Unveiling Affective Polarization Trends in Parliamentary Proceedings

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method to measure political polarization by analyzing emotional language in parliamentary debates, revealing increasing affective polarization over time in the Israeli Knesset.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach to quantify polarization through emotional discourse analysis, moving beyond traditional ideological measures.

Findings

Government and opposition members differ in emotional style.

Affective polarization has significantly increased over time.

The method effectively captures emotional polarization in political discourse.

Abstract

Recent years have seen an increase in polarized discourse worldwide, on various platforms. We propose a novel method for quantifying polarization, based on the emotional style of the discourse rather than on differences in ideological stands. Using measures of Valence, Arousal and Dominance, we detect signals of emotional discourse and use them to operationalize the concept of affective polarization. Applying this method to a recently released corpus of proceedings of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament (in Hebrew), we find that the emotional style of members of government differs from that of opposition members; and that the level of affective polarization, as reflected by this style, is significantly increasing with time.