Publications
Do Politicians Appeal to Discrete Emotions? The Effect of Wind Turbine Construction on Elite Discourse
Tobias Widmann. The Journal of Politics (2025).
Abstract
Do political actors appeal to discrete emotions? In this study, I investigate how politicians adapt their emotional rhetoric to increased political conflict over climate change. To do so, I apply transformer-based machine learning classifier to a large dataset of text data coming from German Members of Parliament in order to measure discrete emotional appeals. Relying on staggered difference-in-difference models, I find robust results showing that local constructions of wind turbines cause the strongest opponents of climate change mitigation policies (radical-right MPs) to appeal to a specific negative moral emotion. Less robust evidence suggests a similar effect for the strongest proponents (Green MPs), however, appealing to a different discrete emotion. The effects range between 0.5 to 1.5 percentage points per additional wind turbine. These findings indicate the importance of distinct emotional framing in political communication with important implications for societal polarization and healthy political discourse.BibTeX
@article{widmann2025windturbine,
title = {Do Politicians Appeal to Discrete Emotions? The Effect of Wind Turbine Construction on Elite Discourse},
author = {Widmann, Tobias},
journal = {The Journal of Politics},
year = {2025},
doi = {10.1086/730742},
url = {https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/730742}
}
When Do Political Parties Moralize? A Cross-National Study of Moral Language in Political Communication
Kristina B. Simonsen, Tobias Widmann. British Journal of Political Science (2024).
Abstract
Political communication on immigration is often highly moralized, with parties making claims to fundamental beliefs about right and wrong. Yet, what drives parties to use this rhetoric remains unexplored. Contributing to research on parties’ positional shifts on immigration, this study examines their strategic use of moral language in immigration discourse. To this end, we develop multilingual moral dictionaries to analyze parliamentary immigration speeches from eight Western democracies over six decades. While party-level factors do not explain moral language use, increased elite polarization on the issue is associated with greater moralization among all parties. Qualitative analysis shows that moral language is used overwhelmingly to attack political opponents, highlighting its divisive nature. These findings serve as a corrective to the notion that extreme, anti-immigrant, opposition parties are the main drivers of the moralization of immigration; instead, the broader political climate crucially shapes party incentives to (de)moralize.BibTeX
@article{simonsen2024moralize,
title = {When Do Political Parties Moralize? A Cross-National Study of Moral Language in Political Communication},
author = {Simonsen, Kristina B. and Widmann, Tobias},
journal = {British Journal of Political Science},
year = {2024},
url = {https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-political-science/article/when-do-political-parties-moralize-a-crossnational-study-of-the-use-of-moral-language-in-political-communication-on-immigration/ACFEDBCD015BDEEA277CE689D3816E96}
}
Setting the Rhetorical Agenda: The Diffusion of Rhetorical Styles in Political Communication
Tobias Widmann, Kristina B. Simonsen. Political Science Research & Methods (2024).
Abstract
Whether a political topic is seen in a moral and moral-emotional light has significant implications for political decision-making and public opinion. However, where prior research has investigated who among different actors has the ability to influence which topics enter the agenda, we do not know how a political topic - once it has entered the agenda - becomes imbued with moral-emotional qualities. To study who drives the moralization of a topic, we zoom in on immigration discourse in Germany. We base our analysis on fine-grained social media data from politicians, political parties, newspapers, and members of the public. After employing a transformer model to identify moral and moral-emotional appeals, we use vector autoregression models to demonstrate the important role of political parties, and especially that of radical-right challengers, in setting the rhetorical tone of public discourse. The results inform theories of moralization and political entrepreneurship.BibTeX
@article{widmann2024rhetorical,
title = {Setting the Rhetorical Agenda: The Diffusion of Rhetorical Styles in Political Communication},
author = {Widmann, Tobias and Simonsen, Kristina B.},
journal = {Political Science Research \& Methods},
year = {2024},
doi = {10.1017/psrm.2024.34},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2024.34}
}
The Evolution of Global Territoriality: A Historical Analysis of Territorial and Functional World Alignments
Daniele Caramani, Siyana Gurova, Tobias Widmann. Comparative Political Studies (2024).
Abstract
This paper examines the global cleavages that structure world politics from the mid-19th century to the present. It develops the concept of cleavage applied at the global level and measures empirically how territorial divisions give way to the politicization of various types of inequality along functional lines cutting across world regions. Covering over 300,000 articles from The Economist between 1843 and 2020, the analysis applies semi-supervised computational text analysis based on word embeddings to capture the territoriality-functionality continuum in global discourse. This method allows testing the theoretical expectation that the territoriality in the politicization of global divisions has diminished historically. Results reveal a trend toward the de-territorialization since World War II, primarily for cleavages about social and economic inequality. Although spikes of territoriality re-appear during interstate wars throughout the entire period, surges of territoriality are temporary and do not reverse the historical trend towards prevailing cross-territorial divisions.BibTeX
@article{caramani2024territoriality,
title = {The Evolution of Global Territoriality: A Historical Analysis of Territorial and Functional World Alignments},
author = {Caramani, Daniele and Gurova, Siyana and Widmann, Tobias},
journal = {Comparative Political Studies},
year = {2024},
doi = {10.1177/00104140241271085},
url = {https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00104140241271085}
}
The effect of temperature on language complexity: Evidence from seven million parliamentary speeches
Risto Conte Keivabu, Tobias Widmann. iScience (2024).
Abstract
Climate change carries important effects on human wellbeing and performance, and increasingly research is documenting the negative impacts of out-of-comfort temperatures on workplace performance. In this study, we investigate the plausibly causal effect of extreme temperatures, i.e., out-of-comfort, on language complexity among politicians, leveraging a fixed effects strategy. We analyze language complexity in over seven million parliamentary speeches across eight countries, connecting them with precise daily meteorological information. We find hot days reduce politicians’ language complexity, but not cold days. Focusing on one country, we explore marginal effects by age and gender, suggesting high temperatures significantly impact older politicians at lower thresholds. The findings propose that political rhetoric is not only driven by political circumstances and strategic concerns but also by physiological responses to external environmental factors. Overall, the study holds important implications on how climate change could affect human cognitive performance and the quality of political discourse.BibTeX
@article{contekeivabu2024temperature,
title = {The effect of temperature on language complexity: Evidence from seven million parliamentary speeches},
author = {Conte Keivabu, Risto and Widmann, Tobias},
journal = {iScience},
year = {2024},
doi = {10.1016/j.isci.2024.110563},
url = {https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(24)01331-2}
}
Creating and Comparing Dictionary, Word Embedding, and Transformer-based Models to Measure Discrete Emotions in German Political Text
Tobias Widmann, Maximilian Wich. Political Analysis (2022).
Abstract
Previous research on emotional language relied heavily on off-the-shelf sentiment dictionaries that focus on negative and positive tone. These dictionaries are often tailored to non-political domains and use bag-of-words approaches which come with a series of disadvantages. This paper creates, validates, and compares the performance of (1) a novel emotional dictionary specifically for political text, (2) locally trained word embedding models combined with simple neural-network classifiers and (3) transformer-based models which overcome limitations of the dictionary approach. All tools can measure emotional appeals associated with eight discrete emotions. The different approaches are validated on different sets of crowd-coded sentences. Encouragingly, the results highlight the strengths of novel transformer-based models, which come with easily available pre-trained language models. Furthermore, all customized approaches outperform widely used off-the-shelf dictionaries in measuring emotional language in German political discourse.BibTeX
@article{widmann2022emotions,
title = {Creating and Comparing Dictionary, Word Embedding, and Transformer-based Models to Measure Discrete Emotions in German Political Text},
author = {Widmann, Tobias and Wich, Maximilian},
journal = {Political Analysis},
year = {2022},
doi = {10.1017/pan.2022.8},
url = {https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/political-analysis/article/creating-and-comparing-dictionary-word-embedding-and-transformerbased-models-to-measure-discrete-emotions-in-german-political-text/2DA41C0F09DE1CA600B3DCC647302637}
}
Fear, Hope, and COVID-19. Emotional Elite Rhetoric and Its Impact on the Public During the First Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Tobias Widmann. Political Psychology (2022).
Abstract
Research shows that emotions matter in politics, and they matter during a public health crisis. Yet, a comprehensive analysis of emotional political rhetoric during the COVID-19 crisis is still missing. Based on parties’ position in the political arena (government versus populist radical parties), I expect differences in how specific emotions are employed and in how these messages actually influence the public. To test my hypotheses, I use word embeddings and neural network classifiers to measure fear and hope appeals in social media messages of political parties in four European countries. Furthermore, I rely on more than 1,400,000 public tweets of random citizens to estimate the impact of party messages. To do so, I employ vector autoregression (VAR) analysis to compare retweet volumes of political messages to emotional expressions in public tweets. Results indicate two main findings, (1) populist radical parties communicate less about the pandemic and decrease fear and increase hope appeals while COVID case numbers are rising whereas government parties exhibit the opposite pattern; (2) increased diffusion of party tweets consistently precedes change in partisans’ emotional expressions the following day. The findings can carry important implications for (affective) polarization and the level of protective behavior among the population.BibTeX
@article{widmann2022covid,
title = {Fear, Hope, and COVID-19. Emotional Elite Rhetoric and Its Impact on the Public During the First Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic},
author = {Widmann, Tobias},
journal = {Political Psychology},
year = {2022},
doi = {10.1111/pops.12831},
url = {https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pops.12831}
}
Does Radical-Right Success Make the Political Debate More Negative? Evidence from Emotional Rhetoric in German State Parliaments
Vicente Valentim, Tobias Widmann. Political Behavior (2021).
Abstract
Political rhetoric has important effects on the quality of democracy, but we know very little about what causes variation in the tone of the political debate. We investigate how radical-right success affects the way the remaining politicians discuss political issues. Using an original dictionary, we measure different positive and negative emotions in a newly collected dataset of speeches in German state parliaments. Taking advantage of variation in the timing of elections when radical-right politicians enter these parliaments, we find that politicians of other parties respond to radical-right success by using more positive, instead of negative, emotions. A mix of quantitative and qualitative analyses suggest that the increase in positive emotions is used strategically for politicians to distance themselves from radical-right discourse. Our findings highlight how radical-right success can create incentives for other politicians to enforce norms that radical-right politicians breach.BibTeX
@article{valentim2021negative,
title = {Does Radical-Right Success Make the Political Debate More Negative? Evidence from Emotional Rhetoric in German State Parliaments},
author = {Valentim, Vicente and Widmann, Tobias},
journal = {Political Behavior},
year = {2021},
doi = {10.1007/s11109-021-09697-8},
url = {https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-021-09697-8}
}
How Emotional Are Populists Really? Factors Explaining Emotional Appeals in the Communication of Political Parties
Tobias Widmann. Political Psychology (2021).
Abstract
This article examines how emotional populist communication is by analyzing the emotionality of electoral manifestos from populist and mainstream parties in postwar Europe. The analysis reveals a U-shaped pattern: mainstream parties use more emotional rhetoric than both populist radical right and niche parties. Emotionality also tends to rise when parties enter government.BibTeX
@article{widmann2021populists,
title = {How Emotional Are Populists Really? Factors Explaining Emotional Appeals in the Communication of Political Parties},
author = {Widmann, Tobias},
journal = {Political Psychology},
year = {2021},
doi = {10.1111/pops.12693},
url = {https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pops.12693}
}