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Abstract Which parties embrace multilingualism in their communication? Despite growing interest in parties’ multilingualism among normative scholars of deliberative democracy, empirical research has largely overlooked the linguistic aspect of party competition. We leverage large‐scale data on Facebook posts by more than 800 parties in 87 democracies and analyze their day‐to‐day language practices. By so doing, we develop, for the first time, the classification of monolingual and multilingual parties around the world. Moreover, using this novel dataset, we explore what factors are associated with parties’ adoption of multilingualism and how multilingual parties predict the language use of candidates they nominate. Overall, this study provides the most comprehensive picture of parties’ multilingualism in contemporary democracies and sets agendas for future research in the intersection of parties and language representation.
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This content will become publicly available on June 27, 2026
Polarization but not populism strengthens the association between presidential election results and emotions
We investigate whether election results are associated with emotional reactions among voters across democracies and under what conditions these responses are more intense. Building on recent work in comparative politics, we theorize that emotional intensity is stronger after elections involving populist candidates and highly polarized parties. We test these expectations with a big-data analysis of emotional reactions on parties’ Facebook posts during 29 presidential elections in 26 democracies. The results show that ideological polarization of political parties might intensify emotional reactions, but there is no clear relationship with the presence of populist candidates.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2215008
- PAR ID:
- 10636365
- Publisher / Repository:
- Cambridge
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Political Science Research and Methods
- ISSN:
- 2049-8470
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 17
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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