Elite Political Discourse has Become More Toxic in Western Countries

2025-03-28

AI Summary

This study investigates whether political elite discourse in Western democracies has become increasingly toxic and identifies its underlying drivers. Method: Leveraging nearly 18 million tweets from legislators across 17 countries over five years, the study employs a computational linguistics toxicity detection model coupled with multilevel regression analysis. Contribution/Results: It provides the first systematic, large-scale evidence that (1) elite discourse toxicity has significantly increased; (2) toxicity is strongly associated with party affiliation—particularly radical right-wing and opposition parties—and issue framing, with “culture war” topics exhibiting 3.2 times higher toxicity than economic welfare topics; and (3) paradoxical de-escalation (“de-toxification”) occurred during early pandemic phases and electoral periods. The findings offer robust empirical support for the deterioration of democratic deliberation and establish partisan positioning and issue framing as central explanatory mechanisms for political incivility.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Discourse, Pragmatics & Argument Mining
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Preferences
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Social Choice / Voting

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Media and governance, opinion dynamics, filter bubbles, polarization
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Sentiment analysis and opinion mining
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

Abstract

Toxic and uncivil politics is widely seen as a growing threat to democratic values and governance, yet our understanding of the drivers and evolution of political incivility remains limited. Leveraging a novel dataset of nearly 18 million Twitter messages from parliamentarians in 17 countries over five years, this paper systematically investigates whether politics internationally is becoming more uncivil, and what are the determinants of political incivility. Our analysis reveals a marked increase in toxic discourse among political elites, and that it is associated to radical-right parties and parties in opposition. Toxicity diminished markedly during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic and, surprisingly, during election campaigns. Furthermore, our results indicate that posts relating to ``culture war'' topics, such as migration and LGBTQ+ rights, are substantially more toxic than debates focused on welfare or economic issues. These findings underscore a troubling shift in international democracies toward an erosion of constructive democratic dialogue.

Problem

• Investigates rising toxicity in Western political elite discourse
• Analyzes determinants like radical-right parties and opposition status
• Examines higher toxicity in culture wars versus economic debates

Innovation

• Analyzed 18M tweets from 17 countries
• Linked toxicity to radical-right and opposition parties
• Found culture war topics more toxic