This paper studies the use of emotion and reason in political discourse. Adopting computational-linguistics techniques to construct a validated text-based scale, we measure emotionality in 6 million speeches given in US Congress over the years 1858-2014. Intuitively, emotionality spikes during times of war and is highest in speeches about patriotism. In the time series, emotionality was relatively low and stable in earlier years but increased significantly starting in the late 1970s. Across Congress Members, emotionality is higher for Democrats, for women, for ethnic/religious minorities, for the opposition party, and for members with ideologically extreme roll-call voting records.
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The CIVICA Data Science seminar series is the interdisciplinary forum of the CIVICA European University of Social Sciences, and alliance of eight leading higher education and research institutions. We foster a community of researchers, practitioners, and policymakers working to address complex societal challenges through the use of novel methodological and data-driven approaches, drawing from machine learning and quantitative methods from biology, sociology, political sciences, economics, and physics, among other disciplines. Shared among the partner institutions of the CIVICA network, this series directly addresses the data science research stream of the CIVICA initiative.
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