Political parties have a choice of whether and how much to frame political issues as fundamental moral matters about right and wrong. This choice is relevant in a broad range of domains and issue areas. For example, in the 2017 general election in the United Kingdom, the Labour Party tried to frame foreign policy as a moral issue by advocating “ethical foreign policy,” with the Shadow Foreign Secretary stating that Labour will “put human rights back at the heart of Britain’s foreign policy.”Footnote 1 In contrast, the Conservative Party took a more pragmatic approach, arguing that the party will continue to “keep hitting Nato spending target.”Footnote 2 Another example is on welfare. In the United States, proponents and opponents of government assistance often frame the debate in terms of deservingness, and the “judgment of who is deserving – as opposed to what is most effective – is at heart a moral one.”Footnote 3 In contrast, welfare discussions that center on effectiveness can be considered nonmoral, instrumental rhetoric, which emphasizes “the efficacy of incentives, returns on investment and long-run savings.”Footnote 4
In this book, I refer to moral argumentation of political views and positions as moral rhetoric. Moral rhetoric frames political discussions into matters about morality. It contrasts conceptually with argumentation that focuses instead on pragmatic considerations about costs, benefits, and consequences. The key question that this book pursues is the following: What role does moral rhetoric have in party politics? To answer this question, the book unpacks what moral rhetoric reflects and what goals it serves in democratic politics. Moral argumentation is an aspect of party behavior that is highly relevant to how the mass public experience politics in everyday life, yet we lack a systematic and comprehensive understanding of what moral rhetoric is and what it does.
There are certainly prior studies on parties’ and politicians’ use of moral rhetoric. The literature on this topic is growing. For example, Lipsitz (Reference Lipsitz2018) argues that moral appeal is a form of strategic emotional appeal. Measuring moral content in the campaign advertisements of elections in the United States, Lipsitz finds that the specific types of moral language used by candidates vary meaningfully across ideologies and that politicians reduce moral appeal distinctive to their party when they switch from the primary to the general election. She also finds that moral appeals increase emotions among voters who support the sponsored candidate and make the ad memorable for voters. Walter (Reference Walter and Feldman2020) similarly sees moral rhetoric as a strategic choice and examines moral rhetoric in Party Election Broadcasts of British parties. Walter explores differences in use of specific kinds of moral rhetoric between parties and over time. Bos and Minihold (Reference Bos and Minihold2022) examine moral rhetoric in three non-English-speaking democracies: Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands. Using text analyses of manifestos and tweets, they show that there are commonalities in moral language used between parties, although there are still ideological differences in usage of specific types of moral appeal. These studies, put together, provide insights on the relationship between party characteristics like ideology and the specific types of moral rhetoric that parties tend to use.
There has not yet been, however, a study that holistically helps us understand the fundamental place that moral rhetoric takes up in party politics. How should we think of the role that parties’ moral rhetoric has in politics? The book explores this overarching question in three parts. First, I start by examining what moral rhetoric is and what it looks like. Is it really a distinct aspect of party communication? And what kinds of moral appeals do parties use? I explore these questions by focusing on understanding (1) how moral rhetoric differs from other aspects of party communication and characteristics, such as ideology, extremism, party type, and issue emphasis, and (2) how appeals to specific moral intuitions vary across parties and issue-specific contexts. Second, I explore what effects, if any, moral rhetoric has on voters. Does it mobilize supporters of the party? Can it persuade nonsupporters? These questions help us understand the usefulness of moral rhetoric as a strategy to potentially win over voters, in particular from the perspectives of mobilization and persuasion – two crucial goals of party competition. Third, I go beyond the electoral angle and examine whether moral rhetoric is a normatively important part of democratic politics. This part of the book conceptualizes moral rhetoric as a form of moral representation, that is, parties’ attempts to represent voters’ moral values. Do voters want such moral representation? What explains voters’ preferences about moral rhetoric in party politics?
In other words, is moral rhetoric really different from other aspects of party behavior like ideological positioning and issue emphasis? How much differences and similarities are there in appeals to specific types of moral rhetoric across parties and contexts? What does moral rhetoric do for electoral politics and democratic representation? To answer these questions, this book delves into what moral rhetoric is, how it is used, and the goals it serves in democratic politics. The book examines how moral rhetoric is different from other aspects of party communication; the extent to which there are differences and similarities in parties’ use of specific types of moral rhetoric, especially at the level of issues and issue positions; how moral rhetoric serves parties’ efforts to mobilize and persuade voters; and whether moral rhetoric is normatively important for democratic representation. This book hence provides a comprehensive understanding of the landscape, the electoral functions, and the representational significance of moral rhetoric in party politics.
To prelude the findings and conclusions, focusing on the context of Western democracies, the book illustrates that moral rhetoric is a distinct aspect of party communication that is integral to politics. I show that the concept of moral rhetoric is different from ideology, extremism, or other types of rhetoric, and that there are meaningful similarities in the patterns of moral rhetoric usage across parties and contexts. Furthermore, moral rhetoric has significance for voters. Analyses reveal not only that moral rhetoric is more broadly appealing electorally than one might think but also that moral rhetoric is a fundamental part of democratic politics that many voters want from parties and politicians. In short, the ultimate answer to the question at the heart of this book is that moral rhetoric can have a more unifying role in party politics than many scholars, pundits, and observers of politics might expect. Among the contributions of such a conclusion is that it sheds new light on extant understandings of morality in politics, which typically zoom in on the conflictual, divisive, and polarizing aspects of morality. The book thus paves the way for a different, or more positive, perspective with which to study morality in politics and party competition going forward.
Before unpacking the research contained in this book, I will explain, in the rest of this introductory chapter, the concepts of rhetoric and moral rhetoric and why it is important to study them. I present specific examples of moral rhetoric across a wide variety of contexts to further substantiate the concept. In this process, I differentiate moral rhetoric from nonmoral rhetoric, which includes pragmatic, consequentialist rhetoric – that is, the conceptual opposite of moral rhetoric. Next, I discuss various aspect of the research framework that will facilitate understanding of the remaining chapters of the book – Chapters 2–6. I end Chapter 1 with a detailed outline of each of those chapters and a conclusion.
1.1 Why Rhetoric? Why Moral Rhetoric?
In this section, I explain what moral rhetoric is and why the book focuses on moral rhetoric. I do this in two steps. First, I discuss how I conceptualize “rhetoric” and why it warrants attention. Then I move on to discuss what moral rhetoric is and why it is the focus of this book. As I will explain, moral rhetoric is a type of political argumentation that appeals to moral considerations in explaining and justifying one’s views, thereby framing political discussions into moral judgments about right and wrong. This kind of rhetoric is worthy of attention because it is likely to be highly resonant to the average voter and arguably has the potential to have negative consequences for democratic politics.
1.1.1 Rhetoric
Much of comparative research on political parties has traditionally focused on spatial models of political competition (see Adams Reference Adams2012 for a review). We have an extensive understanding of the causes and the consequences of parties’ policy positions on the left-right spectrum (e.g., Adams, Ezrow, and Somer-Topcu Reference Adams, Ezrow and Somer-Topcu2014; Adams and Somer-Topcu Reference Adams and Somer-Topcu2009; Ezrow Reference Ezrow2005; Schumacher, de Vries and Vis Reference Schumacher, de Vries and Vis2013). This makes sense because position-taking is arguably the most important decision that parties must make. Ideological alignment is an important determinant of voters’ vote choices and policy support, so strategic position-taking is essential for parties’ electoral and policy success (Downs Reference Downs1957).
Issue emphasis is another policy-related aspect of party competition that has been of interest to many scholars (e.g., de Sio and Weber Reference de Sio and Weber2014; Klüver and Spoon Reference Klüver and Spoon2016; Tavits Reference Tavits2007). There is a limited amount of information that voters can take in when forming political preferences and reaching political decisions (Converse Reference Converse and Apter1964; Zaller Reference Zaller1992). Therefore, it is advantageous for parties to emphasize information that benefits them. In particular, if parties “own” certain issues because they are considered more competent in those issues compared to rival parties, then it is advantageous for parties to emphasize the issues in which they are more competent so that voters receive information that is favorable to the party (Budge and Farlie Reference Budge, Farlie, Daalder and Mair1983; Petrocik Reference Petrocik1996). In studies of issue salience and emphasis in party competition, it is common to dichotomize issues into two types: sociocultural versus economic (e.g., Tavits and Letki Reference Tavits and Letki2014; Tavits and Potter Reference Tavits and Potter2015).
While these kinds of strategies are important in party campaigns, in real life, party communication is more than left-right position-taking and issue emphasis. Parties also try to frame messages to their advantage by explaining and justifying their views in certain ways. That is, when parties talk, they explain why their political positions are better than those of their rivals and why they as parties are better than rival parties. For example, a party might justify its hawkish position on foreign policy on the grounds that the position is fair, protects national interests, or is practically viable. More generally, a party might try to increase voter support for the party by arguing that they are a party that cares, upholds the rule of law, or gets things done.
This is an intuitive aspect of political communication that is easily observable in the ways that parties conduct politics in real life, although it has not received much attention in political science. These kinds of argumentation help parties frame their messages into a coherent, easy-to-understand selling point. Framing research shows that frames in political messages shape the considerations that are salient when people think about politics, influencing their behaviors and attitudes (e.g., Chong and Druckman Reference Chong and Druckman2007). If we apply this to the context of party competition, then we can expect that how parties frame their messages will be consequential to voters. Furthermore, going beyond academia, media commentators often point out the importance of language and framing in electoral competition. According to an analysis during the 2017 midterm elections in the United States, “the question for national Democrats in this chaotic moment is less about policy … than prioritization in messaging.”Footnote 5 Adam Green of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee also pointed out the importance of framing in his assessment that the Democrats’ “framing of this 2018 economic populist messaging is admirable and strong.”Footnote 6
This book uses the word “rhetoric” to refer to argumentation that frames messages by emphasizing a certain type of consideration. This use of the term is consistent with theoretical studies of rhetoric, which build on Aristotle (1909). They define rhetoric as arguments that are meant to influence and persuade (e.g., Garsten Reference Garsten2011), thus implying that rhetoric is about intent (telos). If we think of parties’ framing choices as decisions that are meant to increase influence on and persuasion of the mass public, then the way this book uses the term rhetoric is consistent with approaches in political theory. Moreover, the book’s conceptualization of rhetoric is in line with how empirical studies in political science have used the term. While extant studies generally do not define what rhetoric is, the term is used broadly to refer to an aspect of messages that characterizes them and is being emphasized, such as emotional rhetoric, populist rhetoric, and xenophobic rhetoric (e.g., Busby, Gubler, and Hawkins Reference Busby, Gubler and Hawkins2019; Osnabrügge, Hobolt, and Rodon Reference Osnabrügge, Hobolt and Rodon2021; Pérez Reference Pérez2015). Among the articles published in the American Journal of Political Science between 2020 and 2024, several articles specifically use the term “rhetoric” to study a particular aspect of messaging, such as “polarizing rhetoric” (Noble Reference Noble2024) and “anxious rhetoric” (Simmons and Shaffer Reference Simmons and Shaffer2024). In that time period, there are a number of other articles that are not about rhetoric per se, but use similar terms, such as “narratives” (Kalla and Broockman Reference Kalla and Broockman2023) and “frames” (Tobin, Schneider and Leblang Reference Tobin, Schneider and Leblang2022). Those kinds of studies again examine a particular aspect of messaging, such as “positive” or “negative” (e.g., Feltovich and Giovannoni Reference Feltovich and Giovannoni2024).
As reflected in the array of studies on rhetoric, there is no prior systematic theory-driven classification of the types of rhetoric that exist in party politics or politics more generally. Perhaps the closest that comes to providing one is Blumenau and Lauderdale (Reference Blumenau and Lauderdale2024). They examine the persuasiveness of different rhetorical “elements” in political arguments. The elements include appeals to authority, fairness, history, national greatness, populism, common sense, costs versus benefits, morality, or crisis concerns, and use of hominem attacks, country comparisons, metaphors, public opinion data, or considerations about side effects. The authors created the list by reading debate transcripts from the United Kingdom’s Houses of Parliament on a variety of issues. The authors explain that the list is “not intended to be exhaustive” (259) and serves the empirical purpose of being conducive to “multiple implementations” (259) in survey experimental contexts. Nonetheless, it is based on a clear statement of what they mean by a rhetorical element, which the authors define as “a feature of political argument that is used to emphasize the desirability or undesirability of a given policy” (259). Hence, the conceptualization of rhetoric I use in this book – argumentation that highlights a certain type of consideration – seems to be in line with both theoretical and empirical literatures on rhetoric.
1.1.2 Moral Rhetoric
Among the different kinds of rhetoric that parties may use, this book focuses on moral rhetoric.Footnote 7 Moral argumentations of political views frame political matters, ranging from positions on specific policy issues like immigration law reform to more general positions about the state of government and incumbent performance, into matters about fundamental notions of right and wrong. This conceptualization of moral rhetoric is consistent with how previous work in comparative party politics has thought of moral argumentation (e.g., Bos and Minihold Reference Bos and Minihold2022; Jung Reference Jung2020, Reference Jung2023; Kraft and Klemmensen Reference Kraft and Klemmensen2024; Walter Reference Walter and Feldman2020). It is also in line with the larger body of work on moral argumentation in the American context, which has examined moral messaging in presidential speeches (Shogan Reference Shogan2007), newspaper articles (Clifford and Jerit Reference Clifford and Jerit2013; Clifford et al. Reference Clifford, Jerit, Rainey and Motyl2015), campaign ads (Lipsitz Reference Lipsitz2018; Moses and Gonzales Reference Moses and Gonzales2015), public opinion (Kraft Reference Kraft2018), and particular issue topics (Voelkel et al. Reference Voelkel, Malik, Redekopp and Willer2022). Although these studies examine moral rhetoric in different settings and sources, a common thread they share is that moral rhetoric is conceived as moral argumentation of some policy or political position.
To elaborate, moral rhetoric can be used in both policy and non-policy contexts. In policy contexts, moral rhetoric appears in a wide variety of issue areas, including the economy, immigration, taxation, health, the environment, and so on. Moral rhetoric is not confined to the prototypical “morality issues” one might commonly think of, such as abortion and LGBTQ rights. Some studies have in fact questioned the assumed moral categorization of issues like gay rights and show that nonmoral consequentialist, pragmatic argumentation can also be used on those issues (e.g., Marietta Reference Marietta2008; Mucciaroni Reference Mucciaroni2011). Pragmatic, consequentialist argumentation, which are arguments based on considerations about concrete costs, benefits, and evidence, are typically theorized as the counterpart to moral argumentation (e.g., Colombo Reference Colombo2019; Jung Reference Jung2020, Reference Jung2023; Marietta Reference Marietta2008; Ryan Reference Ryan2019).
By conceptualizing moral rhetoric as argumentation that applies to a wide variety of policy positions, the book’s approach is also in line with previous research on morality at the individual voter level. This strand of research examines the level of moral conviction that people have toward political issues (e.g., Kertzer et al. Reference Kertzer, Powers, Rathbum and Iyer2014; Ryan Reference Ryan2014, Reference Ryan2016, Reference Ryan2019). Moral conviction is defined as “the belief that a given attitude is a reflection of one’s core feelings or beliefs about fundamental issues of right and wrong” (Skitka et al. Reference Skitka, Hanson, Morgan and Wisneski2021, 348). The studies show that people vary in their level of moral conviction and that moral conviction exists in not just sociocultural issue positions but also economic issue positions. If so, then it is reasonable, as this book does, to think of moral argumentation at the elite level as arguments that also exist across different kinds of issues.
But not all political communication is explicitly about policy. In non-policy contexts, moral appeals can be used in reference to moral judgments about the overall party or the overall features of politicians. In these contexts, moral appeals are not necessarily tied to a particular policy or issue position. Moral appeals are used generically to refer to morally (un)desirable qualities of the party or politician of interest, such as (dis)honesty and how (un)caring they are. Nonetheless, it is important to note that even these moral appeals often at least implicitly stem from policy-based considerations. For example, if a party morally condemns a rival politician as someone who cannot be trusted, then it is not hard to imagine that the party would connect this to policy by referencing some track record of that politician, whether it is failure to keep a previous campaign promise or serve the interests of the general public. Therefore, while moral rhetoric is not always used explicitly in reference to a policy or an issue, in democracies where there is programmatic party competition, it is often related to the policies and positions that the party is espousing. I discuss concrete examples of moral rhetoric in these various contexts in Section 1.2.
But what exactly is morality? There are numerous theories of morality in a wide array of disciplines including psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience, but a widely accepted definition is that morality is a system of “interlocking sets of values, practices, institutions, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible” (Haidt Reference Haidt2008, 70). At the heart of this definition is that morality promotes cooperation between individuals and within groups (see also Jung and Clifford Reference Jung and Clifford2025). Suppressing self-interest for the pursuit of collective interest has been important for the evolution of humankind, so we as humans have developed moral intuitions about right and wrong as a way to facilitate such cooperation. This conceptualization that cooperation is at the heart of morality is shared by many theories of and approaches to morality (e.g., Curry Reference Curry, Schackelford and Hansen2016; Enke Reference Enke2019; Greene Reference Greene2013; Haidt Reference Haidt2012). Morality is a system of prescriptive judgments about right and wrong. It consists of normative beliefs that are deeply rooted and widely shared. Therefore, moral rhetoric can be thought of as argumentation that appeals to intuitions about right and wrong that are ultimately based on achieving a social good – a good for the broader collective rather than just the individual self.
Specifically, the Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) provides a useful framework with which to pin down exactly what those intuitions look like. According to the MFT, which is a widely studied framework of morality, there are five moral foundations that constitute our moral “taste buds” (Haidt Reference Haidt2012, 131). Drawing from anthropology and evolutionary biology, the MFT argues that intuitions about care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity are the building blocks of morality that are “organized in advance of experience” (Haidt Reference Haidt2012, 153). The theory explains that people instinctively think it is important to protect the weak, be fair to others, defend groups they are part of, show respect for legitimate authority, and leave certain things uncontaminated and clean. People have intuitive repulsion to harm, cheating, betrayal, subversion, and degradation. There are certainly debates about whether these five foundations are accurate or complete in characterizing humans’ moral intuitions (e.g., Harper and Rhodes Reference Harper and Rhodes2021; Janoff-Bulman and Carnes Reference Janoff-Bulman and Carnes2013; Schein and Gray Reference Schein and Gray2015), but these five have been the most widely endorsed in previous work. Moral rhetoric can therefore be thought of as arguments that appeal to such moral intuitions.Footnote 8
A further way to understand moral rhetoric is to differentiate it from other categories of rhetoric, that is, nonmoral rhetoric. The conceptual opposite of moral rhetoric and therefore the most relevant type of nonmoral rhetoric is pragmatic, consequentialist rhetoric. As mentioned before, studies on moral argumentation have pitted it against pragmatic rhetoric, which can be thought of as arguments based on considerations about concrete costs, benefits, and evidence (e.g., Colombo Reference Colombo2019; Jung Reference Jung2020, Reference Jung2023; Marietta Reference Marietta2008; Ryan Reference Ryan2019). Examples of such pragmatic, consequentialist rhetoric abound. In 2024, the then prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, described Canadians as “pragmatic people who focus on solutions” in response to interview questions about declining public support for the Liberal Party.Footnote 9 Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, conducted an interview with Le Grand Continent in 2020. When discussing his policies on regulation of the tech industry and climate-related initiatives, he described his resolve to communicate and engage with businesses and other sectors as “pragmatism to achieve results.”Footnote 10 In 2019, a British member of parliament, Stephen Kerr, described the leadership of then prime minister Theresa May as “pragmatic, robust, intelligent leadership – all properties she has shown in her response to Russia.”Footnote 11
Pragmatic, consequentialist rhetoric is not the only type of nonmoral rhetoric, but the usefulness of the moral versus pragmatic distinction comes through when we think about how the different types of rhetoric that have been studied in prior research can be roughly categorized into that distinction. For example, Blumenau and Lauderdale (Reference Blumenau and Lauderdale2024) examine fourteen rhetorical elements, as discussed earlier. While the authors do not label any of the rhetorical elements in their experiments as “pragmatism” or “pragmatic,” pragmatic considerations are reflected in a number of the elements under study: appeal to authority, appeal to history, common sense, cost/benefit, country comparison, crisis, public opinion, and side effects. “Appeal to authority” seems to be arguments that rely on evidence from authoritative organizations and sources; “appeal to history” uses evidence-based historical lessons and reflections; “common sense” proposes solutions based on logic; “cost/benefit” refers to explicit cost versus benefit reasoning; “country comparisons” are factual comparisons of one’s country with a different country; “crisis” appeals to negative consequences; “public opinion” uses data on public support for or opposition to a policy; and “side effects” include information about additional benefits of a policy. Meanwhile, many of the other rhetorical elements in Blumenau and Lauderdale (Reference Blumenau and Lauderdale2024) fall into the category of morality. Not only does the article have a rhetorical element named “morality,” but some of the other elements, namely “appeal to fairness” and “appeal to national greatness,” have moral aspects as well.
This book focuses on moral rhetoric because it is a particularly interesting type of rhetoric for a couple of related reasons. First, moral rhetoric is a type of frame that is likely to be highly accessible and resonant to the average voter. The accessibility of moral judgment is evidenced by the vibrant body of work in political science and psychology on moral foundations and moral conviction and their effects on people’s attitudes and behaviors, especially in the American context (Clifford Reference Clifford2022; Garrett and Bankert Reference Garrett and Bankert2020; Ryan Reference Ryan2016; Skitka et al. Reference Skitka, Hanson, Morgan and Wisneski2021). These studies show that voters’ beliefs about the moral foundations of care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity, as well as voters’ moral convictions about sociopolitical views, are often correlated with their ideological positions on the left-right spectrum, positions on specific political issues like social security reform, and willingness to tolerate compromise in politics.
In addition to these studies that directly show the relevance of moral judgment for the mass public, a large body of work on related topics such as values and valence (e.g., Goren et al. Reference Goren, Schoen, Reifler, Scotto and Chittick2016; Jung and Tavits Reference Jung and Tavits2021) also implies that moral evaluations are central. Concepts like values and valence are certainly not the same as morality. In my prior work, I have explored how morality is conceptually different from values more generally and valence in party competition. Starting with values, as discussed in Jung (Reference Jung2020), previous research suggests that existing work on values (e.g., Goren Reference Goren2005; Goren et al. Reference Goren, Schoen, Reifler, Scotto and Chittick2016) does not fully cover the concept of morality. According to Graham et al. (Reference Graham, Haidt, Nosek, Iyer, Koleva and Ditto2011, 368), “reciprocity, loyalty to one’s team or tribe, and concerns about bodily and spiritual purity are ubiquitous in anthropological accounts of morality, yet they do not appear among Schwartz’s 10 values.” Furthermore, while morality research connects morality with emotions and other-regarding judgments, such characteristics are not as prominent in values research. This is likely related to the fact that, as Jung and Clifford (Reference Jung and Clifford2025) more recently explain, expectations about cooperation for the collective good are at the heart of morality while that is not necessarily so for values.
Valence, on the other hand, refers to character-based traits of parties and politicians that are in general normatively and unequivocally desirable, such as competence, integrity, unity, and charisma (Abney et al. Reference Abney, Adams, Clark, Easton, Ezrow, Kosmidis and Neundorf2011; Adams and Merrill III Reference Adams and Merrill2009; Schofield and Sened Reference Schofield and Sened2006; Stokes Reference Stokes and Kavanagh1992; Zakharova and Warwick Reference Zakharova and Warwick2014). When it comes to valence, as mentioned in Jung (Reference Jung2020), there are moral components in some aspects of valence, but not necessarily in all. Specifically, integrity and unity may have some moral bases due to their connections to arguably moral traits like fairness and loyalty, but that is not necessarily the case for competence and charisma. In short, although there are differences from morality, there are moral elements in values and valence, both of which are known to shape people’s sociopolitical attitudes and the way people judge parties and politicians (Clark and Leiter Reference Clark and Leiter2014; Evans and Neundorf Reference Evans and Neundorf2020; Feldman et al. Reference Feldman, Huddy, Wronski and Lown2020; Zur Reference Zur2021). Therefore, these varieties of topics of work imply that moral considerations are accessible and resonant to the average voter, making moral rhetoric an important type of rhetoric to study.
The second reason that moral rhetoric is particularly interesting is that moral rhetoric could have important (negative) consequences for society, as some scholars attribute increasing polarization and hostility around the world to differences in moral worldviews across ideological/partisan lines. There are arguments especially in the American context that moral priorities differ starkly between the left and the right. Studies argue that voters across ideological sides have a difficult time agreeing with each other because of their differences in fundamental moral views, with the left prioritizing protections and rights of individuals and the right putting relatively more weight on tradition and other group-oriented norms (e.g., Clifford and Jerit Reference Clifford and Jerit2013; Graham, Haidt, and Nosek Reference Graham, Haidt and Nosek2009). In response, more recently, there is increasing attention to understanding how such moral divisions can be reduced (e.g., Feinberg and Willer Reference Feinberg and Willer2019; Kalla, Levine, and Broockman Reference Kalla, Levine and Broockman2022). If so, moral rhetoric, as rhetoric that can frame political issues using liberal or conservative moral intuitions about right and wrong, could contribute to sociopolitical conflict and thus needs to be understood better as a type of party communication.
1.2 Examples of Moral Rhetoric
In addition to the motivating examples of moral rhetoric presented in the beginning of this chapter, in this section, I present further examples of moral rhetoric in both policy-specific and more general contexts. Most of the examples come from British politics, which as will be discussed is a major country case of focus in various parts of this book. However, examples from other countries are included as well. These examples illustrate the varied ways in which moral rhetoric can appear in party messaging. To further illustrate the concept, I also contrast some of the examples of moral rhetoric with more pragmatic alternatives.
One of the issue areas where moral rhetoric can be found is the economy. For example, during the 2017 general election in the UK, the Labour Party framed their policy to raise income taxes for the highest earners and cut Value-Added Tax across the board as a policy of fairness. Labour argued that the policy would ultimately lower the tax burden for those in the low and middle-income brackets, with the shadow chancellor John McDonnell saying that the “concept of fairness is at the heart of everything we do.”Footnote 12 Similarly, Kamala Harris, at an interview during the 2024 US presidential campaign, said, “We’re going to have to make sure that the biggest corporations and billionaires pay their fair share. … That’s just it. It’s about paying their fair share.”Footnote 13 During the 2022 leadership contest of the Conservative Party in the UK, Liz Truss argued that “it is fair” that tax cuts benefit high earners more, since the wealthy pay more tax in the first place. This argument was used to defend the position of reversing the expected rise in National Insurance contributions.Footnote 14 These examples illustrate that moral rhetoric can be used to frame both progressive and conservative positions on taxation and the economy overall.
Moral rhetoric can also be used on other domestic issues, such as housing and welfare. In 2018, Theresa May, then prime minister of the UK, emphasized communal morality on the issue of housing, saying that property developers need to build affordable homes to “do their duty to Britain.”Footnote 15 In the run-up to the 2017 general election, Liberal Democrats in the UK framed period poverty as a moral issue, with the party’s spokesperson saying that the Lib Dems will ensure schoolgirls can continue their education “with dignity.”Footnote 16 Moreover, moral arguments exist on the issue of health care, although it is also possible to use pragmatic argumentation. This is well illustrated in the speech delivered by the health minister of the UK government in 2014, titled “The moral and economic case for improving mental health care.”Footnote 17 In 2018, Liz Truss of the Conservative Party in the UK argued that her party has a “forensic” grip on the figures of the National Health Service, unlike the Labour Party.Footnote 18 This kind of argumentation is pragmatic rather than moral.
Additionally, moral rhetoric can be found in issues that are typically considered in the sociocultural domain. During the 2017 general election in the UK, commentators highlighted the moral nature of the immigration issue, saying that immigration “must also be seen in the context of an unfair global economic system.”Footnote 19 In a speech at a refugee center in 2015, then German chancellor Angela Merkel also described her party’s immigration position based on moral values: “There can be no tolerance of those who question the dignity of other people. There is no tolerance of those who are not ready to help, where, for legal and humanitarian reasons, help is due.”Footnote 20 At the same time, restrictive positions on immigration can use moral language as well. In 2023, Rishi Sunak, the then prime minister of the UK, claimed that “[i]llegal migration is not fair on British taxpayers, it is not fair on those who come here legally and it is not right that criminal gangs should be allowed to continue their immoral trade.”Footnote 21 Furthermore, moral arguments were also relevant to the sociocultural issue of confederate monuments in the US. In 2017, there were moral claims that the monuments need to be dismantled for “public safety and homeland security and doing what’s right.”Footnote 22 In the domain of corruption, Emmanuel Macron explicitly framed his policies to deal with corruption in the country as policies for the “moralisation” of the country, in both the 2017 presidential and parliamentary elections.Footnote 23 All these issues, however, did not have to be framed in moral language. For example, there were discussions in the US that confederate monuments need to be removed for the benefit of businesses, which can be considered a pragmatic argument.Footnote 24
Issues of international politics can also be discussed with moral argumentation. Some people talked about Brexit (i.e., the UK’s exit from the European Union) based on moral grounds. In support of Brexit, some argued that the lowering of tariffs that Brexit allows would make food prices more affordable for the poor in the UK and allow developing nations to compete fairly against European countries.Footnote 25 Yet the Brexit issue could also be discussed using nonmoral argumentation, such as pragmatic argumentation, as seen by Emmanuel Macron stating in 2017 that “[p]ragmatism will determine [France’s] new relationship [with Britain].”Footnote 26 Similarly, pragmatic argumentation was used among some pro-Europeanists in the UK’s Conservative Party to defend their pro-EU position, as Antoinette Sandbach, a Conservative member of parliament (MP), explained: “We are pragmatic leavers.”Footnote 27
Additional examples abound in other issue areas. In the US, the Democratic Party has generally framed its position on voting laws from an intensely moral perspective, with the president being asked to “put the full moral prestige” of the presidency behind the issue.Footnote 28 During the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the then prime minister of the UK, Boris Johnson, framed the Conservatives’ decision to reopen schools as a moral decision: “Now that we know enough to reopen schools to all pupils safely, we have a moral duty to do so.’’Footnote 29 In the Democratic primary debate for the 2020 US presidential election, Bernie Sanders framed his position on the environment as a moral one, saying “the Green New Deal that I support … is a moral issue. … That is more important than the profits of the fossil fuel industry.”Footnote 30 This contrasts with messages about the environment that emphasize pragmatic considerations, as seen in the UK Conservative government’s argument from 2023 that its approach to green policies is a “more pragmatic, proportionate and realistic approach.”Footnote 31
Lastly, as discussed in Section 1.1.2, moral rhetoric not only appears in issue-specific communications but also can be used more generally, which I described as moral rhetoric in “non-policy” contexts. For example, after the 2017 general election in the UK, some commentators assessed in general terms that the Labour Party spoke “the language of decency and fairness”Footnote 32 compared to the Conservative Party and that Labour showed “it is imperative to talk in moral terms about right and wrong.”Footnote 33 This is consistent with how left-wing parties, such as the Social Democratic Party in Germany, have traditionally appealed to general notions of “social justice” to speak to and attract the working class.Footnote 34 Nonetheless, the UK’s Conservative Party also used some overall moral messages in their communications for the 2017 general election by talking about the importance of patriotism and serving the country. As a commentator pointed out, the Conservatives’ slogan of “strong, stable leadership in the national interest” is about patriotism.Footnote 35 This kind of messaging was also used on Labour voters, with the then prime minister Theresa May calling “fiercely patriotic” Labour voters to vote Conservative instead.Footnote 36 Another example comes from the 2017 French elections, when some argued that there are overall moral reasons to support Emmanuel Macron instead of Marine Le Pen.Footnote 37 More recently, in 2022, Keir Starmer, leader of the UK’s Labour Party, criticized the then prime minister Boris Johnson over the “partygate” scandal, saying, “What we’ve now got to is a situation where you have a prime minister who has lost the moral authority to lead.”Footnote 38 These kinds of moral rhetoric stand in contrast to messages that emphasize pragmatic, consequentialist leadership.Footnote 39
1.3 Research Framework
Motivated by the real-life and theoretical relevance of moral rhetoric in party communication, this book seeks to understand moral rhetoric’s place in party politics by examining how moral rhetoric is used and its significance in democratic politics. Specifically, I explore whether moral rhetoric is a truly distinct aspect of political communication; patterns of moral rhetoric usage, especially at the disaggregated level of issues and issue positions; whether moral rhetoric can serve parties’ mobilizational and persuasive goals; and what moral rhetoric means for representation. Before pursuing these in Chapters 2–6, I discuss a number of clarifying points about the research approaches of this book.
First, in line with the definition of morality presented in Section 1.1.2, the book relies on the Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) (Haidt Reference Haidt2012) to operationalize moral rhetoric. The MFT is certainly not the only theory of morality (see Harper and Rhodes Reference Harper and Rhodes2021; Janoff-Bulman and Carnes Reference Janoff-Bulman and Carnes2013; Jung and Clifford Reference Jung and Clifford2025; Schein and Gray Reference Schein and Gray2015). But the moral foundations of care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation are specific ways in which moral intuitions often manifest and have been consistently used in research on morality in political science. Therefore, when I measure moral rhetoric in observational data and operationalize moral rhetoric in survey experiments in the later parts of this book, it is useful to rely on the MFT and think of moral rhetoric as appeals to any of those five foundations. Furthermore, the MFT’s view of morality is pluralistic and focuses on the function of morality (i.e., cooperation) rather than its content. Instead of restricting morality to notions like fairness, rights, and autonomy, morality includes concerns about sanctity, hierarchy, and community as well. The MFT is hence different from works that define morality normatively (rather than descriptively), such as Turiel’s (Reference Turiel1983) work that defines the concepts of “justice, rights, and welfare” (3) as moral but others as not. The MFT strives to present a descriptive account of morality, that is, what people around the world consider moral, so it is more suitable for comparative studies of morality.
Second, throughout the book, I conceive of moral rhetoric both dichotomously and continuously. When I use a binary perspective, a message is either moral or not moral. Nonmoral messages do not contain moral considerations, but may instead contain pragmatic, consequentialist argumentation or simply lack any type of justification or explanation. When I use a continuous perspective, it means that moral rhetoric can also be a matter of degree, with argumentations ranging from low levels of moral rhetoric to high levels of moral rhetoric. In the continuous framework, the quantity of interest is how much parties choose to emphasize moral argumentation, not whether they use it. In the theoretical and empirical chapters of this book, moral rhetoric will be conceptualized and operationalized in both ways, which is truthful to how moral rhetoric is used in real life.
Third, the book discusses moral rhetoric as messages coming from parties, although moral rhetoric can come from the party overall or from specific politicians. The examples of moral rhetoric that were presented in Section 1.2 indeed had both parties and individual politicians as the speaker. Nonetheless, in the theoretical and empirical chapters of the book that follow, the agent of moral rhetoric is largely conceptualized as the party, rather than specific politicians. This is an appropriate framework because the goal of the book is to examine moral rhetoric in party campaigns and communications. Individual politicians matter, and there are certainly disagreements and different voices within parties. Still, there is no particular reason to think that the main findings and arguments to be presented in this book are unlikely to hold in contexts where electoral competition is more candidate-centric. And since party competition is of interest in this book, the theoretical discussions and empirical tests center on moral rhetoric at the party level.
Fourth, the book focuses on moral rhetoric in advanced democracies where there is programmatic party competition (Kitschelt Reference Kitschelt2000). Moral rhetoric is defined as framing of political positions in terms of moral judgments about right and wrong. It is conceived to be conceptually different from other aspects of party communication like ideological positioning and issue emphasis. In order to reliably examine whether that is indeed the case and to understand what moral rhetoric looks like across parties, issues, and ideological positions, party–voter linkages need to be based on policies intended to be for the public good. Moreover, a context where voters think of party competition in programmatic terms, rather than personalistic or privately materialistic terms, is helpful for investigating the consequences of moral rhetoric for voters. The later parts of this book examine whether moral rhetoric can mobilize and persuade the public and whether voters think of moral rhetoric as a desirable aspect of democratic politics. Estimations of such effects and measurements of such attitudes are likely to be more comparable in programmatically competitive political contexts. Therefore, the empirical analyses in this book use data from established Western democracies. The total set of countries included are Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, Switzerland, the UK, and the US, while some of the chapters focus exclusively on the British context as a representative case.
Lastly, while there are other angles that could be studied about the topic of moral rhetoric in party campaigns, I focus on exploring what moral rhetoric is as a concept, the specific ways in which it is used, what its effects are on voters, and what it means for democratic representation. While comprehensive, this means that I do not focus on identifying the strategic considerations that determine parties’ use of moral rhetoric in the first place. However, previous studies on moral rhetoric provide some insights, albeit indirectly, on the predictors of moral rhetoric. For example, Lipsitz (Reference Lipsitz2018), in her examination of moral appeals in the campaign ads of US elections, suggests that moral rhetoric is shaped by whether the target audience consists of party activists or the overall electorate. Party-consistent types of moral rhetoric, such as Republicans’ appeals to concerns about loyalty and Democrats’ appeals to care and fairness, are used less when the general electorate is the audience. Clifford and Jerit (Reference Clifford and Jerit2013) hint at a similar conclusion, although their study is not on moral rhetoric from parties or politicians per se but is instead on moral rhetoric on a particular policy issue as reflected in American newspaper media. They find that the intensity of moral rhetoric on stem cell research increases during political activity (e.g., legislative sessions). They also show that moral rhetoric on one side of the stem cell debate increases when the opposing side uses more moral rhetoric. Put together, these studies point to the possibility that moral rhetoric in party communication may increase when there is more (widespread) attention from the public, such as in election periods as opposed to inter-election periods. In short, previous studies jointly imply that audience considerations shape moral rhetoric usage, as is what one would expect from a strategic political party.Footnote 40
Yet, at the same time, there could be other factors as well. Shogan (Reference Shogan2007) examines the moral rhetoric of American presidents and explains that moral rhetoric by presidents depended on a combination of their personal background (e.g., preexisting moral inclinations) as well as strategic considerations. Overall, Shogan argues that moral rhetoric usage is in part a function of contingencies, such as the moral character of the individual and the mood of the times. Therefore, we can speculate that a number of factors are likely to shape political parties’ use of moral rhetoric – not only expectations about what might work given the audience but also the characteristics of the party/leadership and the mood/climate of the sociopolitical context. With this mix of potential factors in the background, the present book focuses on investigating moral rhetoric’s patterns as well as its consequences and significance for democratic politics.
1.4 Outline
The rest of the book is structured as follows. Chapter 2 examines how moral rhetoric is used in party communication using dictionary-based text analysis of party manifestos. The main data include 158 manifestos from six English-speaking democracies (Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States) across thirty-four elections. I first measure moral rhetoric at the aggregate level. The aggregate measure captures the overall level of moral rhetoric used by a party in its campaign. I show that there is variation in moral rhetoric across countries and within countries. I also show the validity of the measurement approach and its robustness to alternative approaches. Overall, we learn that moral rhetoric is a distinct aspect of party messaging that is different from ideology, issue emphasis, and other party characteristics. I then explore patterns in more disaggregate measures of moral rhetoric. Analyses reveal that there are more commonalities in the ways that parties use moral rhetoric than one might expect. Most interestingly, building on the framework of the MFT, I find that differences in the moral palettes of the left and the right that we can expect based on prior work are more nuanced and not as stark when we examine specific moral foundations separately and when we examine appeals at the level of issues.
Having grounded the notion of moral rhetoric and what it looks like in party communication, the book proceeds to examine the mobilizing and persuasive potentials of moral rhetoric in Chapters 3 and 4. To start, Chapter 3 investigates the mobilizing effect of moral rhetoric, that is, effects on party supporters. Based on insights from political and moral psychology, I theorize that moral rhetoric is likely to mobilize the party base, namely those who identify with the party. Moral rhetoric is likely to prime the moral intuitions of copartisan voters. Heightened moral intuitions activate their emotions, which in turn increase willingness to participate in politics. In particular, I focus on the mediating role of positive emotions, especially pride about one’s partisan preference. I test my argument using survey experimental and panel survey data in the British context. Analyses pay particular attention to the steps of the theoretical mechanism. First, using survey experiments, I show that moral rhetoric can increase positive emotions, especially pride. Second, using panel data from the British Election Study, I find that voters who held more positive emotions about their party before the election were more likely to vote and participate in other political activities during the election. In particular, analyses show that pride plays a big role for expressive forms of participation, such as persuading others and displaying an election poster. Third, I investigate the entire causal argument in one step using mediation analysis of a separate survey experiment. Put together, the results show that moral rhetoric can mobilize through pride. At the same time, we learn that the effects are not automatic and that effects are observed for expressive but relatively low-cost, low-engagement forms of political participation. Chapter 3 hence shows that while moral rhetoric can mobilize the party base as expected, the effects are rather limited.
Chapter 4 moves on to investigate the persuasive potential of moral rhetoric, that is, effects on nonsupporters of the party. Based on insights from previous work on moral persuasion and attitudinal bias, I develop theoretical expectations that suggest that moral rhetoric is unlikely to easily persuade, or make nonsupporters see the party in more favorable light. To be sure, there is conflicting insight on this front because some previous studies suggest moral-value alignment between a moral message and the message recipient can make the message persuasive. Yet previous work on attitudinal bias and the influence of partisan/ideological views on moral intuition suggest that moral rhetoric may be unpersuasive regardless of moral-value alignment and even further alienate nonsupporters with negative preexisting attitudes toward the party. Chapter 4 tests the hypotheses using three survey experiments in the British context. I find that moral rhetoric does not easily convince nonsupporters to become more favorable toward the party, as was theorized. However, moral rhetoric can be persuasive when the message is strong and when the party has moral credibility. Under those conditions, moral rhetoric increases favorable attitudes, both on average and among nonsupporters who prioritize the specific moral intuition embedded in the message. There is no evidence that moral rhetoric pushes away nonsupporters. In fact, there is some evidence that moral rhetoric can increase favorable attitudes among those who are negatively predisposed toward the party. In short, results present a nuanced, but rather optimistic picture about the persuasiveness of moral rhetoric. These results, combined with findings in Chapter 3, suggest that moral rhetoric is not that clearly a mobilizational tool over a persuasive tool. In other words, moral rhetoric is not as divisive and polarizing as one might expect.
Chapter 5 shifts away from examining the electoral role of moral rhetoric (i.e., mobilization and persuasion) to understanding the representational role of moral rhetoric. In Chapter 5, I posit that moral rhetoric can be considered parties’ attempts to signal that they represent the moral values of the electorate. If so, how important is moral rhetoric as a form of moral representation? Is it normatively desirable and democratically important for parties to use moral appeals? I examine this question by focusing on understanding people’s attitudes about moral rhetoric in politics. I theorize that many voters do want some level of moral discourse in politics, although there is variation in attitudes. I further theorize that demand for a party’s moral rhetoric exists not only among voters who support the party but also among voters who appreciate moral reasoning in politics, even if they do not support the party. The chapter shows, using original survey data from six countries (Australia, France, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States), that many voters indeed want to see moral discourse in politics. Moreover, voters’ demands for moral rhetoric have both partisan and nonpartisan antecedents. A voter’s copartisan status with the party positively predicts greater demand for moral rhetoric, but so does a voter’s reliance on moral reasoning when thinking about politics, holding partisanship constant. In short, we learn that moral rhetoric has representational significance for many, though not all, voters. These results shed light on why it makes normative sense for moral considerations to play a part in politics and echo the overall point made through Chapters 2, 3, and 4 – moral rhetoric is not necessarily divisive and has potential to bring people together based on shared common grounds.
Chapter 6 ends the book with a summary, discussion of contributions, and avenues for future research. In Section 6.1, I discuss the findings and their limitations, while incorporating insights obtained from qualitative elite interviews that I conducted in the UK context after the research for earlier parts of the book was completed. Conversations with British politicians about moral appeals and communicative frames more generally revealed interesting observations that support as well as shed further light on the motivation, theoretical expectations, and findings of this book. As to contributions, I discuss the multiple implications and significance of the book for studies of comparative party politics, political behavior, and moral psychology. Regarding next directions, I discuss the wide variety of topics that future work could investigate. They include the following questions: How does moral rhetoric interact with other aspects of party politics like valence signaling and the clarity with which parties deliver their positions to voters? How can we observationally measure alternative types of rhetoric such as pragmatic, consequentialist rhetoric? Can we measure net amounts of moral rhetoric? How well are parties delivering moral rhetoric in the sense of aligning with what voters want? What are the consequences of moral-representational (mis)alignment between what voters want and what parties provide? How different is the role of moral rhetoric in the politics of new democracies and authoritarian countries?
1.5 Conclusion
While moral appeals are commonly observed in parties’ messages to voters and there is an increasing literature on moral appeals, we lack a systematic and comprehensive understanding of the role that they play in party politics. The political environment, as people actually experience it, can be more fully understood by understanding how parties frame their political views, in particular how parties engage in moral argumentation – a rhetorical frame that emphasizes considerations about fundamental notions of right and wrong. Moral rhetoric is a particularly interesting and important type of rhetoric to study because of (1) the accessibility and relevance of judgments about right and wrong for the average voter and (2) extant concerns in the academic and policy worlds that combining morality and politics fuels conflict and polarization.
In Chapters 2–6, I investigate what moral rhetoric looks like and the goals it serves in politics by building theoretical expectations from a variety of literatures in political science and psychology and testing them using text analysis, survey analysis, and survey experiments. The analyses cover a total of nine advanced democracies, along with focused single-case studies in the UK context. The book will show that moral rhetoric is a distinct aspect of party communication with consequences for voter mobilization and persuasion, as well as fulfilling the representational expectations of many voters. The book presents a holistic picture of the landscape, electoral effects, and representational significance of moral rhetoric in party politics. Overall findings (including narratives found in the qualitative elite interviews) draw attention to the potential for moral rhetoric to unify and bring people together. This is an important contribution that speaks to prevailing narratives in the scholarly and policymaking worlds that say morality in politics is conflictual, divisive, and polarizing.
In Chapter 2, I start by exploring moral rhetoric in observational data. Using party manifestos from six English-speaking democracies (Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States), I find that moral rhetoric is a distinct aspect of party campaigns that is different from other aspects of party behavior like ideological positioning or issue emphasis. Then I examine the specific patterns in which parties use moral rhetoric, in particular variation across tone, issues, overall ideology, and issue positions. Analyses reveal that there are not only differences but also important commonalities in appeals to particular types of moral rhetoric across parties and contexts. In short, the chapter will illustrate the wide applicability of moral rhetoric and show that there are not only bases for division but also bases for unity in how parties use moral rhetoric.
