Understanding right-Wing politics and leadership through linguistic style

COLLABORATORS: Dr Miriam Koschate-Reis, Senior Lecturer Social Psychology, Psychology (CLES), Dr Travis Coan, Senior Lecturer Politics, Politics (CSSIS), Prof Susan Banducci, Politics (CSSIS) and Turing Fellow, Postdoctoral collaborators: Dr Elahe Naserian-Hanzaei, Politics (CSSIS), Ms Alicia Cork, Psychology (Bath)
IDSAI Research Fellow: Ravi Pandit

Description: One of the most fundamental questions in leadership research is whether leaders shape groups (identity entrepreneurship), or whether changes to a group’s self-understanding require a change in leadership (leader prototypicality). The recent Trump presidency illustrates this question well: On the one hand, political analysts have suggested that Trump was elected leader in response to shifts in the Republican Party created by the Tea Party movement. On the other hand, it has been proposed that Trump has shaped “American Nationalism” as a movement and embedded it in the Republican party. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no research examining prototypical leadership and identity entrepreneurship together over time by examining changes to a group’s self-understanding, and the fit of leaders to this self-understanding. This is a particularly important question given the rise of extreme right-wing groups across the world, and their public endorsement by “mainstream” political leaders. 

Our recent research suggests that a group’s self-understanding is reflected in the linguistic style of its members. By analysing online forum data of right-wing groups and speeches of members of the U.S. congress (leaders), this project aims to examine the self-understanding of a wide spectrum of right-wing and conservative political groups in the U.S., and the role that leadership plays in this self-understanding. Combining computational and statistical methods with political and psychological theory will allow us to gain novel insights into (1.) the dominant group types found in right-wing U.S. politics, and whether there is a differentiation in self-understanding between mainstream and right-wing groups, (2.) the extent to which leaders drive changes in the self-understanding of their group, or whether changes in the group’s self-understanding require a change in leadership.