Political Disaffection and the Decline of the Centre: Quantitative Text Analysis Approaches

Over many decades of research on anti-establishment politicians, scholars have made claims about how they speak. These descriptions are typically critical in nature: populists present the world in terms of moral binaries; they invoke negative emotions like anger and fear; they express emotion intensely and frequently; they are simple and short in speech; they break politeness norms. Such claims are often taken as commonplace wisdom. Yet, systematic measurement of whether these descriptions are true for fringe politicians, more than for their conventional counterparts, is surprisingly sparse. There is reason to believe that anti-establishment figures and politicians of the mainstream may not be as clearly distinguishable in speech as is sometimes thought. Political speech in general has perhaps become simpler since mid-century; mainstream parties are known to borrow stylistic traits and policy positions from rising challengers; and observers have pointed to anxiety-invoking cross-party campaigns in the past decade in Britain. In response, this dissertation applies relatively novel tools for processing large amounts of unstructured data. Text data from United Kingdom and Canadian lower house parliamentary transcripts (1990-2022; 1988-2022) and audio signal data are the basis for tests to assess whether claims made about anti-establishment political figures’ speech are correct.

Department dc:contributor.department

Political Science

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Moez, Catherine

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Cochrane, Christopher

• British politics
• Canadian politics
• political communication
• political disaffection
• populism
• quantitative text analysis

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/141113

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/141113