MPs use emotive rhetoric to sway voters in high-profile debates

Covering two million parliamentary speeches held in the UK House of Commons and the Irish Parliament, Sara B. Hobolt, Moritz Osnabrügge, and Toni Rodon use a dictionary-based method to measure emotive rhetoric. They show that emotive rhetoric is more pronounced in high-profile legislative debates, such as Prime Minister’s Questions, illustrating that emotive rhetoric is one of the tools politicians can use strategically to appeal to voters.