Moral issues in public debates can influence a wide range of political processes: candidate evaluations, emotional responses, and group mobilization. While there is not a clear-cut distinction between what can be considered a “moral issue” and what not, there is overall agreement that moral issues are strictly related to personal values. Moral issues are those that threaten one's fundamental values (Mooney & Schult, 2001; 2008) and trigger attitudinal responses based on core values of citizens’ beliefs systems (Biggers, 2011). This close link between moral issues and values makes the understanding of values a necessary step to reach a better understanding of morality. Values conceptually constitute deep-rooted, enduring guides that give structure to personal attitudes and opinions. They represent ‘cognitive representations of desirable, abstract, trans-situational goals that serve as guiding principles in people’s life’ and ‘can be rank-ordered in terms of relative importance’ (Schwartz, 1992; 1994). Personal values have been shown to be relevant in explaining voting behaviour, as people use them to organize their beliefs on political issues, to make and justify political decisions (Feldman, 2003; Caprara, Schwartz, Vecchione, 2006). Values represent the organising guide for individual choice that give coherence and structure attitudes, opinions, and behaviours. Values need to be activated in a specific situation or political context, for them to influence political behaviour: they can be activated through different forms of political communication, when parties express their ideological positions, political and policy programs.
In this study, we investigate how the personal values system developed by Schwartz (1992) translates to discursive practices among political actors. While citizens make use of their personal values in the political context by identifying which party aligns with their values and motives (van Deth, 1995), political actors make use of values as strategic discursive strategies to frame their messages and sway public opinion (Nelson et al., 2015; Schemer et al., 2012), as well as moralising the respective issues. Thus, we analyze the Facebook posts of political parties and their leaders in Germany and the United Kingdom, regarding Covid-19 debates between Jan 2020 - Apr 2021. As an international ongoing political and health crisis, Covid provides an opportunity to study contested meanings and polarized opinions on a wide range of topics (e.g., vaccination, restriction measures). Furthermore, discourse on social media is characterised by conflict and outrage (Grubbs et al., 2019), so we expect to observe the use of values as discursive strategies in online political communication. Methodologically, we combine qualitative coding techniques (Saldana, 2021) and crowd-coding (Weber et al., 2018) with supervised machine learning (Nelson et al., 2021), to scale-up the investigation of values in political texts.
The implications are threefold: (1) we extend our knowledge of how political actors use personal values as discursive strategies. (2) In turn, by focusing on values in political communication, we bring the communicative features of moralisation in politics to the fore. (3) Lastly, we systematize the investigation of values in political texts to facilitate their integration with studies of other communicative features (e.g., frames, appeals to emotions).
