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Abstract
Previous research has demonstrated that political ideology is rooted, at least in part, in basic values and psychological motives. Relations between psychological and political variables are typically assessed through experimental methods or survey questionnaires administered to ordinary citizens. In my dissertation, I draw on psycholinguistics research, which suggests that one’s linguistic style and word choice are reflective of situational and dispositional psychological factors (Pennebaker, Mehl, Niederhoffer, 2003). I measure the expression of motives and values in both ordinary citizens and political elites using naturally occurring language in relation to seven broad theoretical categories: motivated social cognition, basic values, moral foundations, “three needs,” use of metaphor, emotion, and uniqueness and conformity motivations.
In conducting these analyses, I evaluate two hypotheses regarding the relationship between psychology and ideology. The first perspective posits that there is something in particular about political conservatism that makes it well-suited to address epistemic and existential motivations. The second perspective proposes that all ideologies are essentially equivalent in terms of their capacity to satisfy psychological needs; it associates epistemic and existential needs with political extremity in any form. I find evidence for both of these hypotheses, consistent with a “J-curve” pattern.
In a sample of almost 25,000 ordinary citizens on Twitter, I find support, in general, for the existence of ideological differences specified by theories of motivated social cognition, basic values, moral foundations, and human motivation. In addition, I find support for the J-curve hypothesis when it comes to nearly half of all language categories, and support for the notions that conservatism or extremity play a unique role in only three cases each.
In Study 2, I examined these same relationships in a sample of tweets sent by 388 members of Congress. The psycholinguistic relationships in this sample were less consistent with previous research than for ordinary citizens investigated in Study 1. For instance, conservative legislators used more power and inhibition language than liberal legislators, but there were no ideological differences in language related to conformity and threat. I also observed a weaker influence of political extremity within this dataset. Comparing data from Twitter messages, Facebook posts, and Congressional floor speeches composed during the same time period, I observed that ideological differences in language were more pronounced in the context of relatively informal Twitter and Facebook communication than in more formal Congressional speeches (with a few exceptions).
In Study 3, I investigated the consistency of the psycholinguistic correlates of political ideology across time and in response to threat. Specifically, I sampled Congressional floor speeches from the 116 members of Congress who held office between January 2000 and December 2016. For this study, I focused on five key language categories of interest: threat, certainty, inhibition, fairness, and authority language. I observed that the language of political elites was relatively consistent across time and in response to threat. There were two exceptions to this general trend: legislators used more certainty-oriented language and, somewhat surprisingly, less authority-related language during the period following a salient national threat.
