Politicization of Immigration and Language Use in Political Elites: A Study of Spanish Parliamentary Speeches

Abstract

This study uses natural language processing (NLP) tools to analyze how politicians recreate the stereotype of immigrants in the Spanish Parliament. An interdisciplinary approach from computational linguistics and social psychology has been used to construct a variety of indices about content and linguistic styles. The analysis of 2,516 parliamentary interventions about immigration delivered between 1996 and 2016 by representatives of the two political parties that alternated in power during that period (conservative Popular Party and Spanish Socialist Party) shows that both the rhetorical strategy to present immigrants as “victims” or as a “threat” and the language style that politicians use reveal an interaction between the ideology of the party and the party's political position in government or in the opposition. Results also suggest some changes over time in the polarization and politicization of the debate about immigration.

Uncovering the Secret Life of We-Pronouns in the German Parliament

“…This study advances our understanding of different components of IL language and their impact on IL effectiveness. While previous studies incorporated pronouns in broader leadership concepts (Jordan et al, 2019;Pennebaker, 2011), investigated We-use compared to other pronouns (Chulvi et al, 2024), inconsistently considering possessive pronouns (Fladerer et al, 2021;Steffens & Haslam, 2013), our study showed that We-(personal pronouns) and not Our-language (possessive pronouns) drives IL trends and more strongly predicts political success, supporting the differentiation between collective identity ("we") and collective ownership ("our," Verkuyten & Martinovic, 2017). Furthermore, our negative finding on We-specifications supports that implicit or vague collective identities might be advantageous for leaders (Condor et al, 2013) and challenges to some extent emphasis on salient and explicit IL ("crafting a sense of us," Haslam et al, 2020; see also Hogg et al, 2012).…”

“…For example, Steffens and Haslam (2013) leveraged this quantitative and computational analysis predicting election results by quantifying the use of “we” and “I” in presidential candidates' speeches. Other research explored complex pronoun combinations in parliamentary debates (Chulvi et al, 2024).…”

“…Notably, previous quantitative studies often treated We-use as indicator for social identity construction and leadership without controlling for other factors influencing pronoun use (Chulvi et al, 2024; Steffens & Haslam, 2013; also Fladerer et al, 2021), such as political ideology (Jost & Krochik, 2014), political power (Houck et al, 2022), social status (Kacewicz et al, 2014; Shen, 2024), and other sociodemographics (Rouhizadeh et al, 2016).…”