Work Package I

Work Package I studies whether, and if so how, moralizing political rhetoric on immigration varies across time, space, and political parties. Contributing to existing work that has focused mainly on whether political actors talk more or less about immigration (salience) and/or whether they do so using positive or negative words (position taking), we study their ‘style’, in particular whether they use moralizing language. The work package combines text data from e.g. parliamentary speeches, party manifestos, Twitter, and newspaper editorials in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Sweden, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Austria to analyse the moralization of immigration since the 1960s and up until today. We will develop and compare different tools for computational text analysis, including a moral dictionary translated into and validated in various languages. This work package will contribute with important cross-national and longitudinal insights on the moralization of immigration in political rhetoric, along with text tools that will be made available for other researchers and students to use.