Replication Data for: When Do Political Parties Moralize? A Cross-National Study of the Use of Moral Language in Political Communication on Immigration

Political communication on immigration is often considered to be highly moralized with parties making claims that appeal to fundamental beliefs about right and wrong. Yet, what drives par-ties to use this rhetoric has so far not been investigated. This study contributes to existing re-search that has focused on parties’ positional movements by examining the strategic use of moral language in immigration discourse. To this end, we develop multilingual dictionaries, employing them in parliamentary immigration speeches from eight Western democracies over six decades. While none of the hypothesized party-level factors explain moral language use, increased elite polarization on the issue is associated with greater levels of moralization among all parties. Qualitative analysis shows that moral language is used overwhelmingly to attack political opponents. These results serve as a corrective to the notion that extreme, anti-immigrant, opposition parties are the main drivers of the moralization of immigration; instead, the political climate crucially shapes party incentives to (de)moralize.