Playing to the Gallery: Emotive Rhetoric in Parliaments

Osnabrügge, Moritz; Hobolt, Sara B.; Rodón, Toni

doi:10.1017/s0003055421000356

Cited by 47 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 76 publications

(112 reference statements)

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“…While campaign speeches may seem the more natural forum through which politicians communicate with voters, previous work has highlighted that the single-member district electoral system in the UK provides MPs with an incentive to cultivate a personal vote (Kam 2009). Further, work on UK parliamentary speech has shown that politicians make strategic use of this forum to appeal to voters (Blumenau 2021;Osnabrügge, Hobolt and Rodon 2021). Therefore, in the UK, parliamentary speech is an appropriate forum to study my key questions of interest.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Double Standard? Gender Bias in Voters' Perceptions of Political Arguments

Hargrave

2022

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

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Do the styles politicians use influence how voters evaluate them, and does this matter more for women than for men? Politicians regularly use anecdotal arguments, emotional appeals and aggressive attacks when communicating with voters. However, that women politicians have been branded as ‘nasty’, ‘inhuman’ and ‘unfeminine’ suggests that these strategies may come at a price for some. I report on a novel survey experiment assessing whether voters are biased in their perceptions and evaluations of politicians' communication styles. By manipulating politician gender and argument style, I assess, first, whether politicians incur backlash when violating gender-based stereotypes and, secondly, whether differential perceptions of the styles themselves explain this backlash. I find that style usage has important consequences for how voters evaluate politicians but that this is not gendered. These results have important implications, as they suggest that women politicians may not need to conform to stereotype-expected behaviours in order to receive positive voter evaluations.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Double Standard? Gender Bias in Voters' Perceptions of Political Arguments

Hargrave

2022

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

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“…I test my expectations on parliamentary QTSs from the (federal) parliaments of Belgium (Vragenuur), Croatia (Aktualno Prijepodne), and the UK (Prime Minister's Questions [PMQs]). I work with these debates because they present high gain opportunities for politicians to reach their goals due to the heavy media exposure QTSs tend to receive (Osnabrügge et al, 2021;Salmond, 2014). This makes it a perfect case of parliamentary politics to explore whether there are gender differences in attack strategies that seek to fulfil politicians' goals.…”

Section: Casesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Gender in Parliamentary Attacks and Incivility

Poljak

2022

PaG

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It has been well established that politicians attack their competitors to reach their political goals. As such, there is a considerable amount of literature on their attack behaviour. However, this literature almost exclusively investigates attack behaviour during campaigns, and so far, few studies have addressed the nature of attacks during more routine times in parliaments. This article aims to fill this gap by examining in-parliament attack behaviour and, more specifically, the gender characteristics of attacks. It is theorised that women are less likely to attack and be attacked than men due to the stereotypical gender roles. However, it is anticipated that this compliance to stereotypes diminishes as proximity to elections increases, resulting in women engaging in attacks as much as men. To limit the cost of their divergence, attacks employed by and toward women are expected to be more civil. Lastly, this study argues that adherence to gender stereotypes is stronger in countries with candidate-centred parliamentary systems than party-centred ones. This study finds support for the theoretical framework using longitudinal data on individual attacks in the parliaments of Belgium, Croatia, and the UK. Results confirm that politicians adhere to gender stereotypical roles in parliaments, with women attacking and being targeted less than men, and when women do attack or are targeted, less incivility is employed. Proximity to elections makes both women and men more hostile, but women lower the cost of their increasing attack behaviour by using less incivility, unlike men who increasingly opt for uncivil attacks closer to elections. Additionally, these findings strongly apply in the candidate-centred system of the UK, whereas in the party-centred system of Belgium and Croatia, hardly any support for the theory can be found.

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“…In contrast to these approaches, our goal is to uncover the affective correlates of in-group favoritism and out-group derogation. To this end, we join a growing trend in the social sciences using text as data to trace difficult to measure concepts like sentiment and personality (Gennaro and Ash 2021; Osnabrugge, Hobolt, and Rodon 2021; Ramey et al 2019).…”

Section: Ethnic Identity and Judicial Bias In Comparative Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

“…We evaluate the mechanisms of bias through natural language processing techniques to measure affective patterns associated with favoritism or derogation (e.g., Rice and Zorn 2019). Our work joins recent work using text as data to understand the emotions, personalities, and states of mind of elites and citizens (Boussalis et al 2021;Osnabrugge, Hobolt, and Rodon 2021;Ramey et al 2019).…”

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confidence: 95%

Ethnic Bias in Judicial Decision Making: Evidence from Criminal Appeals in Kenya

2022

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Understanding sources of judicial bias is essential for establishing due process. To date, theories of judicial decision making are rooted in ranked societies with majority–minority group cleavages, leaving unanswered which groups are more prone to express bias and whether it is motivated by in-group favoritism or out-group hostility. We examine judicial bias in Kenya, a diverse society that features a more complex ethnic landscape. While research in comparative and African politics emphasizes instrumental motivations underpinning ethnic identity, we examine the psychological, implicit biases driving judicial outcomes. Using data from Kenyan criminal appeals and the conditional random assignment of judges to cases, we show that judges are 3 to 5 percentage points more likely to grant coethnic appeals than non-coethnic appeals. To understand mechanisms, we use word embeddings to analyze the sentiment of written judgments. Judges use more trust-related terms writing for coethnics, suggesting that in-group favoritism motivates coethnic bias in this context.

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Playing to the Gallery: Emotive Rhetoric in Parliaments

Cited by 47 publications

References 76 publications

A Double Standard? Gender Bias in Voters' Perceptions of Political Arguments

A Double Standard? Gender Bias in Voters' Perceptions of Political Arguments

The Role of Gender in Parliamentary Attacks and Incivility

Ethnic Bias in Judicial Decision Making: Evidence from Criminal Appeals in Kenya

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