Moralistic Imagination of Two-Dimensional Politics

• In Event: Red-Pill or Woke? Polarization and Online Extremism

Abstract

Populism and ideological polarization have constituted two primary features of contemporary US politics, and scholarship increasingly notes that these two forces might interact in reshaping Americans’ identities and the existing political landscape (Uscinski et al., 2021). As a reflection of group relationships, morality can provide an explanatory route to understanding such emerging phenomena. Guided by the Moral Foundations Theory (MFT), literature accounts for the political preferences between liberals and conservatives based on their moral distinctions (i.e., individualizing and binding values) (Haidt, 2012). Meanwhile, populism is conceptualized as “a particular moralistic imagination of politics, a way of perceiving the political world that sets a morally pure and fully unified” (Muller, 2016). Despite the prominence of morality at the intersection of populism and ideological polarization, little is known about the moral features across political typologies and the associated influence on digital politics (See Figure 1).
Prior literature has examined the moral language of political elites’ speeches and social media posts (Breeze, 2020); however, much less is known about how this populist turn is related to their followers' moral languages in their political discourses. Therefore, this study adopted a bottom-up approach to investigate the moral content of political discourses on Reddit communities. We aim to explore the moral discrepancies across political typologies and the role of morality in prompting political discussion. We further investigated how morality interacts with group cues in driving dialogical engagement.
Specifically, we examined three prominent online political communities (“r/trump,” “r/JoeBiden,” and “r/SandersForPresident”) representing right-wing populism, left-wing establishment, and left-wing populism, respectively. We collected 627,903 text entries from the 2020 Presidential election (Aug 2019) to the 2022 midterm election (July 2022), including 101,707 posts and 544,402 comments. We used the extended moral foundation dictionary (eMFD) and entity extraction techniques to annotate text features (i.e., morality and group cues).
Our results first showed that left-wing and right-wing populist supporters’ moral distinctions on individualizing/binding moral values are more cross-cutting than expected. Also, as compared to the left-wing establishment (r/JoeBiden), the moral languages of the left-wing populists (r/SandersForPresident) are much more morally saturated. Next, through mixed-effects regression analysis, we further found that fairness (β = 0.03, p< 0.001), loyalty (β = 0.04, p< 0.001), and ideological out-group cues (β = 0.26, p< 0.001) are positively associated with the number of comments, care (β = −0.04, p<0.001), in-group cues (β = −0.11, p< 0.001), and populist out-group cues (β = −0.27, p< 0.001) are negatively related to the number of comments. Moreover, only ideological outgroup cues can interact with moral values in prompting the number of comments.
In conclusion, this study offers both empirical and theoretical contributions to the digital media research. Empirically, our paper comprehensively examined the moral dynamics across online political communities and supports the two-dimensional framework of American politics. Our findings provide evidence of the moral divergence within the Democratic Party as well as the moral convergence between left-wing and right-wing populism. Theoretically, this study provides a bottom-up perspective on the rise of populism in the digital space, presents the nuanced interactions between morality and online political discussion, and reveals the moralization of politics in a network society.

Authors

• Yifei Wang, UCSB

• Kokil Jaidka, National University of Singapore