Resist to Commit: Concrete Campaign Statements and the Need to Clarify a Partisan Reputation

Eichorst, Jason; Lin, Nick

doi:10.1086/700002

Cited by 16 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…Thereafter we present the results of regression models to analyze the relationship between the type of debate and the level of emotiveness at the speech level. When interpreting the effect sizes, it is important to keep in mind that even a small number of emotive words can strongly influence the rhetorical style or meaning of a speech (see e.g., Crabtree et al 2020;Eichorst and Lin 2019). Figure 2 illustrates the development of emotive rhetoric in the period 2001 until 2019.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Playing to the Gallery: Emotive Rhetoric in Parliaments

2021

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Research has shown that emotions matter in politics, but we know less about when and why politicians use emotive rhetoric in the legislative arena. This article argues that emotive rhetoric is one of the tools politicians can use strategically to appeal to voters. Consequently, we expect that legislators are more likely to use emotive rhetoric in debates that have a large general audience. Our analysis covers two million parliamentary speeches held in the UK House of Commons and the Irish Parliament. We use a dictionary-based method to measure emotive rhetoric, combining the Affective Norms for English Words dictionary with word-embedding techniques to create a domain-specific dictionary. We show that emotive rhetoric is more pronounced in high-profile legislative debates, such as Prime Minister’s Questions. These findings contribute to the study of legislative speech and political representation by suggesting that emotive rhetoric is used by legislators to appeal directly to voters.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Playing to the Gallery: Emotive Rhetoric in Parliaments

2021

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“…Because of its simplicity and availability in multiple languages, LIWC and its dictionary are currently the state of the art measure for vagueness in political science (e.g. Wedeking, 2011, 2012;Crabtree et al, 2016;Eichorst and Lin, 2018) Yet, using LIWC to identify vague statements is admittedly a crude instrument. The list of words is composed using research from psychology, business and medicine, and is originally designed to measure the cognitive writing style of individuals.…”

Section: Vagueness Measurement Using Word Embeddingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Strategic Analysis of Judicial Behavior

Epstein

Weinshall

2021

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Why do judges craft vague opinions if these are less likely to be implemented? In a game-theoretic model, Staton and Vanberg (2008) argue that opinion vagueness is a function of judge's policy preferences and their fear of potential noncompliance by the legislature. Yet, the court's ability to use vagueness ultimately depends on their level of public support. I empirically test the implications of their model in a comparative study of two constitutional courts in Germany and France, analyzing novel data on opinion vagueness obtained by neural networks. My findings confirm that a court's public support is indeed the key factor for explaining how courts strategically use vagueness. The German Federal Constitutional Court, a court with high public support, uses vagueness primarily to take advantage of the policy expertise of other policy makers and to strategically pressure the legislature. In contrast, the French Conseil Constitutionel, a court with low public support, uses vagueness as a "defensive mechanism" to hide noncompliance from public view. My results therefore imply that current models of judicial behavior underestimate the full extent of strategic behavior of courts.

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“…In the last decade the usage of computational methods for text analysis has drastically expanded in scope and has become the focus of many social science studies, allowing for a sustained growth of the text-as-data community (Grimmer and Stewart, 2013). Political scientists have in particular focused on exploiting available texts as a valuable (additional) data source for a number of analyses types and tasks, including inferring policy positions of actors from textual evidence (Laver et al, 2003;Slapin and Proksch, 2008;Lowe et al, 2011, inter alia), detecting topics (King and Lowe, 2003;Hopkins and King, 2010;Grimmer, 2010;Roberts et al, 2014), and analyzing stylistic aspects of texts, e.g., assessing the role of language ambiguity in framing the political agenda (Page, 1976;Campbell, 1983) or measuring the level of vagueness and concreteness in political statements (Baerg et al, 2018;Eichorst and Lin, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%