Tobias Widmann
Biographic Data
| ID | 4371098 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tobias Widmann |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tobias |
| FAMILY NAME | Widmann |
| SIGNATURE | WIDMANN T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Aarhus University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1692-3101 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 8 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 180 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 8 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Do Politicians Appeal to Discrete Emotions? The Effect of Wind Turbine Construction on Elite Discourse
Do political actors appeal to discrete emotions? In this study, I investigated how politicians adapt their emotional rhetoric to increased political conflict over climate change. To do so, I applied a transformer-based machine learning classifier to a large dataset of text data coming from German Members of Parliament (MPs) in order to measure discrete emotional appeals. Relying on staggered difference-in-difference models, I found robust results…
Setting the tone
Whether a topic is seen in a moral or moral-emotional light has significant political implications. Yet, we lack knowledge about the process of moralization: Who defines the way topics are communicated about? Where prior research has investigated the relative power of different actors to place a topic on the agenda or shape opinions, we study who sets the moral and moral-emotional tone of debate. To do so, we zoom in on immigration discourse in G…
The Evolution of Global Cleavages
This paper examines the global cleavages that structure world politics from the mid-19th century to the present. It develops the concept of cleavage applied at the global level and measures empirically how territorial divisions give way to the politicization of various types of inequality along functional lines cutting across world regions. Covering over 300,000 articles from The Economist between 1843 and 2020, the analysis applies semi-supervis…
When Do Political Parties Moralize
Political communication on immigration is often highly moralized, with parties making claims to fundamental beliefs about right and wrong. Yet, what drives parties to use this rhetoric remains unexplored. Contributing to research on parties’ positional shifts on immigration, this study examines their strategic use of moral language in immigration discourse. To this end, we develop multilingual moral dictionaries to analyze parliamentary immigrati…
Does Radical-Right Success Make the Political Debate More Negative? Evidence from Emotional Rhetoric in German State Parliaments
Political rhetoric has important effects on the quality of democracy, but we know very little about what causes variation in the tone of the political debate. We investigate how radical-right success affects the way the remaining politicians discuss political issues. Using an original dictionary, we measure different positive and negative emotions in a newly collected dataset of speeches in German state parliaments. Taking advantage of variation …
Creating and Comparing Dictionary, Word Embedding, and Transformer-Based Models to Measure Discrete Emotions in German Political Text
Previous research on emotional language relied heavily on off-the-shelf sentiment dictionaries that focus on negative and positive tone. These dictionaries are often tailored to nonpolitical domains and use bag-of-words approaches which come with a series of disadvantages. This paper creates, validates, and compares the performance of (1) a novel emotional dictionary specifically for political text, (2) locally trained word embedding models combi…
Fear, Hope, and Covid‐19
Research shows that emotions matter in politics, and they matter during a public health crisis. Yet, a comprehensive analysis of emotional political rhetoric during the COVID‐19 crisis is still missing. Based on parties' position in the political arena (government versus populist radical parties), I expect differences in how specific emotions are employed and in how these messages actually influence the public. To test my hypotheses, I use word e…
How Emotional Are Populists Really? Factors Explaining Emotional Appeals in the Communication of Political Parties
Are populists really more emotional than mainstream parties? The alleged link between populism and emotional communication has barely been subject to systematic empirical scrutiny. I use literature on populist communication and appraisal theory to generate expectations about which political parties use which emotional appeals. I test these claims by applying a novel emotional dictionary to a large set of text data including more than 700,000 pres…
How Emotional Are Populists Really? Factors Explaining Emotional Appeals in the Communication of Political Parties
Are populists really more emotional than mainstream parties? The alleged link between populism and emotional communication has barely been subject to systematic empirical scrutiny. I use literature on populist communication and appraisal theory to generate expectations about which political parties use which emotional appeals. I test these claims by applying a novel emotional dictionary to a large set of text data including more than 700,000 pres…
Creating and Comparing Dictionary, Word Embedding, and Transformer-Based Models to Measure Discrete Emotions in German Political Text
Previous research on emotional language relied heavily on off-the-shelf sentiment dictionaries that focus on negative and positive tone. These dictionaries are often tailored to nonpolitical domains and use bag-of-words approaches which come with a series of disadvantages. This paper creates, validates, and compares the performance of (1) a novel emotional dictionary specifically for political text, (2) locally trained word embedding models combi…
Does Radical-Right Success Make the Political Debate More Negative? Evidence from Emotional Rhetoric in German State Parliaments
Political rhetoric has important effects on the quality of democracy, but we know very little about what causes variation in the tone of the political debate. We investigate how radical-right success affects the way the remaining politicians discuss political issues. Using an original dictionary, we measure different positive and negative emotions in a newly collected dataset of speeches in German state parliaments. Taking advantage of variation …
Fear, Hope, and Covid‐19
Research shows that emotions matter in politics, and they matter during a public health crisis. Yet, a comprehensive analysis of emotional political rhetoric during the COVID‐19 crisis is still missing. Based on parties' position in the political arena (government versus populist radical parties), I expect differences in how specific emotions are employed and in how these messages actually influence the public. To test my hypotheses, I use word e…
Do Politicians Appeal to Discrete Emotions? The Effect of Wind Turbine Construction on Elite Discourse
Do political actors appeal to discrete emotions? In this study, I investigated how politicians adapt their emotional rhetoric to increased political conflict over climate change. To do so, I applied a transformer-based machine learning classifier to a large dataset of text data coming from German Members of Parliament (MPs) in order to measure discrete emotional appeals. Relying on staggered difference-in-difference models, I found robust results…
Setting the tone
Whether a topic is seen in a moral or moral-emotional light has significant political implications. Yet, we lack knowledge about the process of moralization: Who defines the way topics are communicated about? Where prior research has investigated the relative power of different actors to place a topic on the agenda or shape opinions, we study who sets the moral and moral-emotional tone of debate. To do so, we zoom in on immigration discourse in G…
The Evolution of Global Cleavages
This paper examines the global cleavages that structure world politics from the mid-19th century to the present. It develops the concept of cleavage applied at the global level and measures empirically how territorial divisions give way to the politicization of various types of inequality along functional lines cutting across world regions. Covering over 300,000 articles from The Economist between 1843 and 2020, the analysis applies semi-supervis…
When Do Political Parties Moralize
Political communication on immigration is often highly moralized, with parties making claims to fundamental beliefs about right and wrong. Yet, what drives parties to use this rhetoric remains unexplored. Contributing to research on parties’ positional shifts on immigration, this study examines their strategic use of moral language in immigration discourse. To this end, we develop multilingual moral dictionaries to analyze parliamentary immigrati…
How Emotional Are Populists Really? Factors Explaining Emotional Appeals in the Communication of Political Parties
Are populists really more emotional than mainstream parties? The alleged link between populism and emotional communication has barely been subject to systematic empirical scrutiny. I use literature on populist communication and appraisal theory to generate expectations about which political parties use which emotional appeals. I test these claims by applying a novel emotional dictionary to a large set of text data including more than 700,000 pres…
Fear, Hope, and Covid‐19
Research shows that emotions matter in politics, and they matter during a public health crisis. Yet, a comprehensive analysis of emotional political rhetoric during the COVID‐19 crisis is still missing. Based on parties' position in the political arena (government versus populist radical parties), I expect differences in how specific emotions are employed and in how these messages actually influence the public. To test my hypotheses, I use word e…
Does Radical-Right Success Make the Political Debate More Negative? Evidence from Emotional Rhetoric in German State Parliaments
Political rhetoric has important effects on the quality of democracy, but we know very little about what causes variation in the tone of the political debate. We investigate how radical-right success affects the way the remaining politicians discuss political issues. Using an original dictionary, we measure different positive and negative emotions in a newly collected dataset of speeches in German state parliaments. Taking advantage of variation …
Creating and Comparing Dictionary, Word Embedding, and Transformer-Based Models to Measure Discrete Emotions in German Political Text
Previous research on emotional language relied heavily on off-the-shelf sentiment dictionaries that focus on negative and positive tone. These dictionaries are often tailored to nonpolitical domains and use bag-of-words approaches which come with a series of disadvantages. This paper creates, validates, and compares the performance of (1) a novel emotional dictionary specifically for political text, (2) locally trained word embedding models combi…
Do Politicians Appeal to Discrete Emotions? The Effect of Wind Turbine Construction on Elite Discourse
Do political actors appeal to discrete emotions? In this study, I investigated how politicians adapt their emotional rhetoric to increased political conflict over climate change. To do so, I applied a transformer-based machine learning classifier to a large dataset of text data coming from German Members of Parliament (MPs) in order to measure discrete emotional appeals. Relying on staggered difference-in-difference models, I found robust results…
Setting the tone
Whether a topic is seen in a moral or moral-emotional light has significant political implications. Yet, we lack knowledge about the process of moralization: Who defines the way topics are communicated about? Where prior research has investigated the relative power of different actors to place a topic on the agenda or shape opinions, we study who sets the moral and moral-emotional tone of debate. To do so, we zoom in on immigration discourse in G…
The Evolution of Global Cleavages
This paper examines the global cleavages that structure world politics from the mid-19th century to the present. It develops the concept of cleavage applied at the global level and measures empirically how territorial divisions give way to the politicization of various types of inequality along functional lines cutting across world regions. Covering over 300,000 articles from The Economist between 1843 and 2020, the analysis applies semi-supervis…
When Do Political Parties Moralize
Political communication on immigration is often highly moralized, with parties making claims to fundamental beliefs about right and wrong. Yet, what drives parties to use this rhetoric remains unexplored. Contributing to research on parties’ positional shifts on immigration, this study examines their strategic use of moral language in immigration discourse. To this end, we develop multilingual moral dictionaries to analyze parliamentary immigrati…
Law (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · Psychology (5 works) · Social Psychology (5 works) · Social Psychology (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Linguistics (3 works) · Political economy (3 works)