Polarization, Not Extremists, Drives Moral Language on Immigration

What the Study Asks

Kristina Simonsen and Tobias Widmann investigate when and why political parties use moral language in debates about immigration. Moral language here means rhetoric that frames immigration in terms of right and wrong, duty, purity, or fairness—claims about fundamental beliefs rather than pragmatic trade-offs. Understanding these dynamics matters because moralized rhetoric can deepen conflict, shape public attitudes, and alter policy debates on a high-salience issue.

How the Study Measures Moral Language

The authors build multilingual moral dictionaries and apply dictionary-based text analysis to parliamentary speeches about immigration from eight Western democracies spanning six decades. This comparative, longitudinal design lets them track changes in moral rhetoric over time and across party families and institutional contexts. They supplement the quantitative text analysis with qualitative coding to examine how moral language is deployed in practice.

What the Authors Test and Find

Simonsen and Widmann assess whether party-level factors (for example, party ideology or the presence of extreme anti-immigrant parties) or the broader elite debate on immigration better explains moralization. Key findings are:

• Party-level characteristics do not reliably predict the use of moral language on immigration.
• Periods of greater elite polarization on immigration—when parties are sharply divided on the issue—are associated with higher levels of moralization across the party system.
• Qualitative analysis shows that moral language is used overwhelmingly to attack political opponents, underscoring its adversarial and divisive function.

These results challenge the expectation that moralization is driven mainly by extreme, anti-immigrant opposition parties; instead, the overall political climate matters more.

Implications for Parties, Scholars, and Public Debate

The study implies that efforts to reduce moralized immigration rhetoric cannot focus only on marginal parties: when elites polarize around immigration, all parties face incentives to moralize. For scholars, the findings highlight the importance of contextual, cross-national perspectives and careful text-based measurement of moral language. For publics and policymakers, the research suggests that depolarizing elite debate could reduce the moral framing that intensifies conflict over immigration policy.

Article Note

This analysis appears in the British Journal of Political Science and combines large-scale comparative text analysis with qualitative inspection to trace the political drivers and functions of moralized immigration rhetoric across Western democracies.