In a significant shift from previous trends, recent research has uncovered a sharp rise in negative language use by politicians in the United States, particularly aligning with Donald Trump’s entry into the political scene in 2015. The new study is unprecedented in its comprehensive analysis of millions of quotes from politicians over 12 years, using advanced linguistic tools to assess the escalation of negative language.
The findings, published in Scientific Reports, provide evidence that this shift towards negativity has persisted beyond election campaigns, indicating a lasting change in the tone of political conversation in the United States.
In recent years, many Americans have felt that the language of politics has grown increasingly negative. This perception has been especially prominent since Trump’s foray into the political arena. Previous studies have suggested growing political polarization and negativity, but until now, concrete evidence showing the evolution of political language over time was lacking. This gap in knowledge spurred researchers to investigate whether the perceived negativity aligns with actual changes in political discourse.
“In 2016, when Trump was elected president, everyone had the impression that the tone of politics had become rougher, uglier, and more negative,” said study author Robert West, an assistant professor and head of the Data Science Lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne.
“As data scientists, we were curious to see whether people’s hunch was right. But we didn’t have data for it yet, since there was no public corpus of news quotations linked to the people who had uttered them. So we went on a four-year journey to compile such a corpus, Quotebank, and by the time we were done collecting the data, Trump’s term was done, too. So by the time we could analyze the tone of politics, we had Obama’s as well as Trump’s presidencies to study.”
Quotebank comprises nearly a quarter-billion quotes extracted from over 127 million online news articles spanning 12 years, from September 2008 to April 2020. To focus specifically on U.S. politics, the researchers extracted 24 million quotes from 18,627 politicians, ensuring a comprehensive and representative sample for the current study.
To objectively measure the tone of political language over time, the research team employed a tool called the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), which analyzes text for various psychological and emotional content. Each quote was scored based on the percentage of words reflecting negative emotions, such as anger, anxiety, and sadness, as well as the use of swear words. The researchers then averaged these scores monthly, creating a timeline of political language tone over 12 years.
The researchers found a substantial spike in the use of negative language starting in June 2015, aligning with the beginning of Donald Trump’s primary campaign. This wasn’t just a small uptick; the frequency of negative emotion words surged by 1.6 standard deviations, an 8% increase from the pre-campaign average. The increase wasn’t limited to general negativity but spanned across specific categories like anger, anxiety, sadness, and swear words.
Interestingly, while there was a significant jump in negative language in 2015, the study also found that the overall tone of political language had actually been decreasing in negativity during Barack Obama’s presidency before this point. This suggests a notable shift in the political climate with Trump’s entry into politics.
One of the most revealing aspects of the study was the influence of prominent speakers, particularly Donald Trump, on this trend. When Trump’s quotes were removed from the analysis, the jump in negative language in June 2015 dropped by 40%, indicating his significant impact. However, the increase in negativity was not solely due to Trump. The trend persisted even when his quotes were excluded, indicating a broader shift in the political landscape. The negative tone persisted throughout Trump’s term, indicating a lasting change in the political discourse.
“People’s hunch is true: during Trump’s presidency, the tone of U.S. politics became significantly more negative, and it happened as a sudden jump at the time when Trump’s primary campaign started,” West told PsyPost.
Additionally, the researchers found systematic differences in the use of negative language based on party affiliation and the party’s role at the federal level. Notably, the increase in negative language from June 2015 onwards was more pronounced among Republican politicians compared to their Democrat counterparts.
While the findings are robust, the study is not without its limitations. One key consideration is the role of media in shaping the dataset. Since the quotes were sourced from online news articles, it’s possible that the observed increase in negativity could be influenced by the media’s reporting preferences or biases. Additionally, the study focused on digital news sources, which might not fully represent the wider media landscape, including traditional news outlets and television.
The study, “United States politicians’ tone became more negative with 2016 primary campaigns“, was authored by Jonathan Külz, Andreas Spitz, Ahmad Abu-Akel, Stephan Günnemann, and Robert West.