Emotion and Reason in Political Language

Abstract 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 six million speeches given U.S. Congress over years 1858–2014. Intuitively, spikes during times war is highest about patriotism. In time series, was relatively low stable earlier but increased significantly starting late 1970s. Across members, higher for Democrats, women, ethnic/religious minorities, opposition party members with ideologically extreme roll-call voting records.