Politicization of Immigration and Language Use in Political Elites: A Study of Spanish Parliamentary Speeches

Abstract

This study uses natural language processing (NLP) tools to analyze how politicians recreate the stereotype of immigrants in the Spanish Parliament. An interdisciplinary approach from computational linguistics and social psychology has been used to construct a variety of indices about content and linguistic styles. The analysis of 2,516 parliamentary interventions about immigration delivered between 1996 and 2016 by representatives of the two political parties that alternated in power during that period (conservative Popular Party and Spanish Socialist Party) shows that both the rhetorical strategy to present immigrants as “victims” or as a “threat” and the language style that politicians use reveal an interaction between the ideology of the party and the party's political position in government or in the opposition. Results also suggest some changes over time in the polarization and politicization of the debate about immigration.

Keywords

immigration stereotyping prejudice parliamentary discourse computational linguistics

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Abdou

L. H.

Bale

Geddes

A. P.

(2022). Centre-right parties and immigration in an era of politicization. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 48(2), 327–340. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2020.1853901

Alonso

Fonseca

S. C.

(2011). Immigration, left and right. Party Politics, 18(6), 865–884. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068810393265

Alonso

Rovira

(2015). Spain: No country for the populist radical right? South European Society and Politics, 20(1), 21–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/13608746.2014.985448

Amat i Puigsech

Garcés-Mascareñas

(2018). Politicization of immigration in Spain: an exceptional case?. http://ceaseval.eu/publications/14_AmatGarces_WP5_Spain.pdf.

Anolli

Zurloni

Riva

(2006). Linguistic intergroup bias in political communication. The Journal of General Psychology, 133(3), 237–255. https://doi.org/10.3200/GENP.133.3.237-255

Bäck

E. A.

Bäck

Gustafsson Sendén

Sikström

(2018). From I to we: Group formation and linguistic adaption in an online xenophobic forum. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 6(1), 76–91. https://doi.org/10.5964/jspp.v6i1.741

Bale

(2008). Turning around the telescope: Center-right parties and immigration and integration policy in Europe. Journal of European Public Policy, 15(3), 315–331. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501760701847341

Benson

(2013). Shaping immigration news: A French-American comparison. Cambridge University Press.

Berkhout

Van der Brug

(2013). Why do events only sometimes lead to politicization? Assessing the politicization of migration in Western Europe, 1995-2009. ECPR General Conference, Bordeaux, France. https://ecpr.eu/Events/Event/PaperDetails/2424.

10.

Blanca

M. J.

Alarcón

Arnau

Bono

Bendayan

(2017). Non-normal data: Is ANOVA still a valid option? Psicothema, 29(4), 552–557. https://doi.org/10.7334/psicothema2016.383

11.

Blas-Arroyo

J. L.

(2003). “Perdóneme que se lo diga, pero vuelve usted a faltar a la verdad, señor Gonzalez”: Form and function of politic verbal behaviour in face-to-face Spanish political debates. Discourse & Society, 14(4), 395–423. https://doi.org/10.1177/095792650301400400

12.

Brooks

Manza

Cohen

E. D.

(2016). Political ideology and immigrant acceptance. Socius, 2, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023116668881

13.

Bull

Wells

(2012). Adversarial discourse in prime minister’s questions. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 31(1), 30–48. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927(11425034

14.

Charlesworth

T. E.

Banaji

M. R.

(2022). Word embeddings reveal social group attitudes and stereotypes in large language corpora. In Dehghani

Boyd

R. L.

(Eds.), Handbook of language analysis in psychology (pp. 494–408). Guilford Press.

15.

Cichocka

Bilewicz

Jost

J. T.

Marrouch

Witkowska

(2016). On the grammar of politics—or why conservatives prefer nouns. Political Psychology, 37(6), 799–815. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12327

16.

Cohen

(1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences (2nd ed.). Erlbaum. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203771587

17.

Consterdine

Kintz

(2018). State-of-the-art report on public attitudes, political discourses and media coverage on the arrival of refugees. CEASEVAL. http://ceaseval.eu/publications/02_Consterdine_State-of-the-art_report_on_public_attitudes.pdf.

18.

Conway

L. G.

Zubrod

(2022). Are U.S. presidents becoming less rhetorically complex? Evaluating the integrative complexity of Joe Biden and Donald Trump in historical context. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 41(5), 613–625. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X221081126

19.

Dennison

Mendes

M. S.

(2019). When do populist radical right parties succeed? Salience, stigma, and the case of the end of Iberian ‘exceptionalism’. European University Institute. http://hdl.handle.net/1814/62226.

20.

De Wilde

(2011). No polity for old politics? A framework for analyzing the politicization of European integration. Journal of European Integration, 33(5), 559–575. https://doi.org/10.1080/07036337.2010.546849

21.

Dovidio

Hewstone

Glick

Esses

(2010). Prejudice, stereotyping and discrimination: Theoretical and empirical overview. In Dovidio

J. F.

Hewstone

Glick

(Eds.), The SAGE handbook of prejudice, stereotyping and discrimination (pp. 3–28). Sage.

22.

Fiske

S. T.

Cuddy

A. J. C.

Glick

(2007). Universal dimensions of social perception: Warmth and competence. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(2), 77–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2006.11.005

23.

Formanowicz

(2020). Verb intergroup bias: Verbs are used more often in reference to in-groups than out-groups. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 11(6), 854–864. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550619893957

24.

Gattinara

P. C.

Morales

(2017). The politicization and securitization of migration in Western Europe: Public opinion, political parties and the immigration issue. In Bourbeau

(Ed.), Handbook of migration and security (pp. 273–294). Edward Elgar.

25.

Gaucher

Friesen

J. P.

Neufeld

K. H. S.

Esses

V. M.

(2018). Changes in the positivity of migrant stereotype content: How system-sanctioned pro-migrant ideology can affect public opinions of migrants. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 9(2), 223–233. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550617746463

26.

Goffman

(1974). Frame analysis. Harper & Row.

27.

Gonzalez-Enriquez

(2017). The Spanish exception: Unemployment, inequality and immigration, but no right-wing populist parties. Real Instituto Elcano. https://www.realinstitutoelcano.org/en/work-document/the-spanish-exception-unemployment-inequality-and-immigration-but-no-right-wing-populist-parties/ .

28.

Graf

Bilewicz

Finell

Geschke

(2013). Nouns cut slices: Effects of linguistic forms on intergroup bias. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 32(1), 62–83. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X12463209

29.

Grande

Schwarzbözl

Fatke

(2019). Politicizing immigration in Western Europe. Journal of European Public Policy, 26(10), 1444–1463. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2018.1531909

30.

Green-Pedersen

Krogstrup

(2008). Immigration as a political issue in Denmark and Sweden. European Journal of Political Research, 47(5), 610–634. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6765.2008.00777.x

31.

Greussing

Boomgaarden

H. G.

(2017). Shifting the refugee narrative? An automated frame analysis of Europe’s 2015 refugee crisis. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 43(11), 1749–1774. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2017.1282813

32.

Grover

Mark

(2019). Detecting potential warning behaviours of ideological radicalization in an alt-right subreddit. Proceedings of the Thirteenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2019). https://ojs.aaai.org//index.php/ICWSM/article/view/3221.

33.

Gustafsson Sendén

Lindholm

Sikström

(2014). Selection bias in choice of words: Evaluations of “I” and “We” differ between contexts, but “They” are always aorse. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 33(1), 49–67. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X13495856

34.

Haas

H. G.

Natter

(2015). The determinants of migration policies. Does the political orientation of governments matter? International Migration Institute. https://www.migrationinstitute.org/publications/the-determinants-of-migration-policies-does-the-political-orientation-of-governments-matter .

35.

Heizmann

Huth

(2021). Economic conditions and perceptions of immigrants as an economic threat in Europe: Temporal dynamics and mediating processes. International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 62(1), 56–82. https://doi.org/10.1177/0020715221993529

36.

Helbling

(2014). Framing immigration in Western Europe. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 40(1), 21–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2013.830888

37.

Hooghe

Marks

(2009). A postfunctionalist theory of European integration: From permissive consensus to constraining dissensus. British Journal of Political Science, 39(1), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123408000409

38.

Houck

S. C.

Conway

L. G.

III, Zubrod

(2022). Automated integrative complexity: Language analysis tools for psychological research. In Dehghani

Boyd

R. L.

(Eds.), Handbook of language analysis in psychology (pp. 173–188). Guilford Press.

39.

Houck

S. C.

Huber

K. J.

Ess

Proulx

M. L.

(2020). Cognitive complexity in political contexts. Oxford research encyclopedia of politics. Published online: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.1024

40.

Kearney

M. W.

(2021). Gendered tweets: Computational text analysis of gender differences in political discussion on Twitter. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 40(4), 482–503. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X20969752

41.

Jordan

K. N.

(2022). Language analysis in political psychology. In Dehghani

Boyd

R. L.

(Eds.), Handbook of language analysis in psychology (pp. 159–172). Guilford Press.

42.

Jordan

K. N.

Sterling

Pennebaker

J. W.

Boyd

R. L.

(2019). Examining long-term trends in politics and culture through language of political leaders and cultural institutions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(9), 3476–3481. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1811987116

43.

Jost

J. T.

Krochik

(2014). Ideological differences in epistemic motivation: Implications for attitude structure, depth of information processing, susceptibility to persuasion, and stereotyping. In Elliot

A. J.

(Ed.), Advances in motivation science (pp. 181–231). Elsevier Academic Press.

44.

Jost

J. T.

Sterling

(2020). The language of politics: Ideological differences in congressional communication on social media and the floor of Congress. Social Influence, 15(2), 80–103. https://doi.org/10.1080/15534510.2020.1871403

45.

Kaati

Shrestha

Cohen

(2016a). Linguistic analysis of lone offender manifestos [Paper presentation]. 2016 IEEE International Conference on Cybercrime and Computer Forensic (ICCCF), Vancouver, BC, Canada. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCCF.2016.7740427.

46.

Kaati

Shrestha

Cohen

Lindquist

(2016b). Automatic detection of xenophobic narratives: A case study on Swedish alternative media [Paper presentation]. 2016 IEEE Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI), Tucson, Arizona, USA. https://doi.org/10.1109/ISI.2016.7745454.

47.

Kacewicz

Pennebaker

J. W.

Davis

Jeon

Graesser

A. C.

(2014). Pronoun use reflects standings in social hierarchies. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 33(2), 125–143. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X13502654

48.

Karasawa

Maass

(2008). The role of language in the perception of persons and groups. In Sorrentino

Yamaguchi

(Eds.), Handbook of motivation and cognition across cultures (pp. 315–341). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-373694-9.00014-3.

49.

Keblusek

Giles

Maass

(2017). Communication and group life: How language and symbols shape intergroup relations. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 20(5), 632–643. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368430217708864

50.

Kellstedt

P. M.

(2003). The mass media and the dynamics of American racial attitudes. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584600500477153.

51.

Kocijan

Kukec

(2022). Immigration attitudes among Western and Eastern European MPs: Social identity, economic aspects and political ideology. Comparative European Politics, 20, 33–52. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41295-021-00254-5

52.

Körner

Overbeck

J. R.

Körner

Schütz

(2022). How the linguistic styles of Donald Trump and Joe Biden reflect different forms of power. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 41(6), 631–658. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927(221085309

53.

Kriesi

Grande

Lachat

Dolezal

Bornschier

Frey

(2008). West European politics in the age of globalization. Cambridge University Press.

54.

Lakoff

(2004). Don’t think of an elephant! Know your values and frame the debate. Chelsea Green Publishing Company.

55.

Larose

D. T.

(2014). Discovering knowledge in data: An introduction to data mining. Wiley.

56.

Lee

T. L.

Fiske

S. T.

(2006). Not an outgroup, not yet an ingroup: Immigrants in the stereotype content model. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 30(6), 751–768. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2006.06.005

57.

Liu

(2022). Pronoun usage as a measure of power personalization: A general theory with evidence from the Chinese-speaking world. British Journal of Political Science, 52(3), 1258–1275. https://doi.org/https://https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123421000181

58.

Markaki

Longhi

(2013). What determines attitudes to immigration in European countries? An analysis at the regional level. Migration Studies, 1(3), 311–337. https://doi.org/10.1093/migration/mnt015

59.

Mendelsohn

Budak

Jurgens

(2021). Modeling framing in immigration discourse on social media. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, 2219–2263. https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.179.

60.

Mendez

Cebolla

Pinyol i Jiménez

(2014). ¿Han cambiado las percepciones sobre la inmigración en España? Crítica, 994, 14–21. https://fundacionalternativas.org/publicaciones/han-cambiado-las-percepciones-sobre-la-inmigracion-en-espana-2/

61.

Meyer

Rosenberger

(2015). The politicization of immigration in Austria. In Van der Brug

D'Amato

Ruedin

Berkhout

(Eds.), The politicization of migration (pp. 31–51). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315723303

62.

Morales

Pardos-Prado

Ros

(2015). Issue emergence and the dynamics of electoral competition around immigration in Spain. Acta Politica, 50(4), 461–485. https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2014.33

63.

Mudde

(2007). Populist radical right parties in Europe. Cambridge University Press. https://https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511492037.

64.

Odmalm

(2012). Party competition and positions on immigration: Strategic advantages and spatial locations. Comparative European Politics, 10(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2010.20

65.

Odmalm

(2018). The party politics of migration. In Weinar

Bonjour

Zhyznomirska

(Eds.), The Routledge handbook of the politics of migration in Europe (pp. 263–295). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315512853

66.

Odmalm

Bale

(2015). Immigration into the mainstream: Conflicting ideological streams, strategic reasoning and party competition. Acta Politica, 50, 365–378. https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2014.28

67.

Pardos-Prado

(2015). How can mainstream parties prevent niche party success? Center-right parties and the immigration issue. The Journal of Politics, 77(2), 352–367. https://doi.org/10.1086/680040

68.

Pennebaker

J. W.

(2011). The secret life of pronouns: What our words say about us. Bloomsbury Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqt006

69.

Pennebaker

J. W.

Chung

C. K.

(2008). Computerized text analysis of Al-Qaeda transcripts. In Krippendorff

Bock

(Eds.), A content analysis reader (pp. 453–465). Sage.

70.

Pennebaker

J. W.

Chung

C. K.

(2012). Language and social dynamics. University of Texas Press.

71.

Pennebaker

J. W.

Chung

C. K.

Frazee

Lavergne

G. M.

Beaver

D. I.

(2014). When small words foretell academic success: The case of college admissions essays. PLoS ONE, 9(12), e115844. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115844

72.

Pennebaker

J. W.

Chung

C. K.

Ireland

Gonzales

Booth

(2007). The development and psychometric properties of LIWC2007. University of Texas.

73.

Perdue

C. W.

Dovidio

J. F.

Gurtman

M. B.

Tyler

R. B.

(1990). Us and them: Social categorization and the process of intergroup bias. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59(3), 475–486. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.59.3.475

74.

Prins

S. B.

(2018). Polarization: identifying extreme attitudes [Master thesis, University of Twente]. University of Twente Research Repository. https://essay.utwente.nl/76420/.

75.

Ramírez-Esparza

Pennebaker

J. W.

García

Suriá

(2007). Psicología del uso de las palabras: Un programa de computadora que analiza textos en español. Revista Mexicana de Psicología, 24(1), 85–99.

76.

Rinken

(2015). Actitudes hacia la inmigración y los inmigrantes: ¿en qué es España excepcional? Migraciones. Revista del Instituto Universitario de Estudios sobre Migraciones, 37, 53–74. https://doi.org/10.14422/mig.i37.y2015.003

77.

Ros

Morales

(2015). The politicization of immigration in Spain. In van der Broug

D’Amato

Berkhout

Ruedin

(Eds.), The politicization of immigration (pp. 119–139). Routledge.

78.

Rubini

Menegatti

Moscatelli

(2014). The strategic role of language abstraction in achieving symbolic and practical goals. European Review of Social Psychology, 25(1), 263–313. https://doi.org/10.1080/10463283.2014.985501

79.

Sánchez-Junquera

Chulvi

Rosso

Ponzetto

S. P.

(2021). How do you speak about immigrants? Taxonomy and StereoImmigrants dataset for identifying stereotypes about immigrants. Applied Sciences, 11(8), 3610. https://doi.org/10.3390/app11083610

80.

Savaş

Greenwood

R. M.

Blankenship

B. T.

Stewart

A. J.

Deaux

(2021). All immigrants are not alike: Intersectionality matters in views of immigrant groups. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 9(1), 86–104. https://doi.org/10.5964/jspp.5575

81.

Schmider

Ziegler

Danay

Beyer

Bühner

(2010). Is it really robust? Reinvestigating the robustness of ANOVA against violations of the normal distribution assumption. Methodology: European Journal of Research Methods for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, 6(4), 147–141. https://doi.org/10.1027/1614-2241/a000016

82.

Seyle

D. C.

Pennebaker

J. W.

(2004). “We’re right, they aren’t”: A linguistic picture of extremism [Paper presentation]. Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Austin, TX, USA.

83.

Shrestha

Kaati

Cohen

(2020). Extreme adopters in digital communities. Journal of Threat Assessment and Management, 7(12), 72–84. https://doi.org/10.1037/tam0000143

84.

Simmons

Silver

Johnson

Taylor

Wike

(2018). In Western Europe, populist parties tap anti-establishment frustration but have little appeal across ideological divide. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/07/Pew-Research-Center_Western-Europe-Political-Ideology-Report_2018-07-12.pdf .

85.

Srinivasa-Desikan

(2018). Natural language processing and computational linguistics: A practical guide to text analysis with Python, Gensim, spaCy, and Keras (1st ed.). Packt Publishing.

86.

Sterling

Jost

J. T.

Bonneau

(2020). Political psycholinguistics: A comprehensive analysis of the language habits of liberal and conservative social media users. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 118(4), 805–834. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000275

87.

Tausczik

Y. R.

Pennebaker

J. W.

(2010). The psychological meaning of words: LIWC and computerized text analysis methods. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 29(1), 24–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X09351676

88.

Torregrosa

Thorburn

Lara-Cabrera

Camacho

Trujillo

H. M.

(2020). Linguistic analysis of pro-ISIS users on Twitter. Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression, 12(3), 171–185. https://doi.org/10.1080/19434472.2019.1651751

89.

Turnbull-Dugarte

S. J.

(2019). Explaining the end of Spanish exceptionalism and electoral support for Vox. Research & Politics, 6(2) April–June. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053168019851680

90.

Van der Brug

D'Amato

Ruedin

Berkhout

(Eds.). (2015). The politicization of migration. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315723303

91.

Van Dijk

T. A.

(1999). Political discourse and racism: Describing others in western parliaments. In Riggins

(Ed.), The language and politics of exclusion: Others in discourse (pp. 31–64). Sage.

92.

Van Swol

L. M.

Carlson

C. L.

(2015). Language use and influence among minority, majority, and homogeneous group members. Communication Research, 44(4), 512–529. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650215570658

93.

Van Swol

L. M.

Kane

A. A.

(2019). Language and group processes: An integrative, interdisciplinary review. Small Group Research, 50(1), 3–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046496418785019

94.

Wei

Jacobson López

(2019). The role of language in anti-immigrant prejudice: What can we learn from immigrants’ historical experiences? Social Sciences, 8(3), 93. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci8030093

95.

Wissler

Almashraee

Monett

Paschke

(2014). The gold standard in corpus annotation [Paper presentation]. 5^th IEEE GSC, Passau, Germany. https://doi.org/10.13140/2.1.4316.3523.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.05 MB