Broadening the study of morality in multiparty settings through a novel dictionary translation and validation methodology

Abstract

Individuals' exposure to morality elicits instantaneous intuitions and influences personal behavior without rational thought or reasoning. Despite our increasing knowledge about the ideology‐driven use of morality in bipartisan systems, we lack a good understanding, on the one hand, of political actors' use of moral appeals in multiparty settings and, on the other hand, of what incentives besides ideology lead political actors to strategically use morality. To fill this gap, we examine parties' use of moral appeals applying newly translated versions of the Moral Foundations Dictionary (MFD) into four languages (French, German, Italian, and Spanish) to party manifestos. Our analysis focuses on 31 elections in nine European multiparty systems over the last two decades. Our findings suggest that the use of morality is ideology‐driven for some moral foundations, whereas some other moral domains are being used by political actors according to an issue‐dependent logic. From a methodological perspective, this article proposes (i) a fully reproducible semi‐automatic translation procedure and (ii) an innovative time‐ and resource‐efficient dictionary validation methodology based on formally translated documents.