What do you mean? Language and Political Trust in Multilingual Settings

Do languages play a role in how we perceive and interpret political messages? Does language or different language varieties in voicing political messages shape people’s trust in one another? Although recent works have studied whether the way we speak affects the way we think and how this might be normatively problematic (Peled and Bonotti 2019), we are still oblivious to the effect of different languages and dialects on people’s political trust. Our research design applies a matched guised test, an experimental design that randomly exposes respondents to different messages -some of them political- in different languages and accents, allowing us to measure individual’s trust towards the message sender and the perceived credibility of the message. This experimental design retrieves the average treatment effect of the different combinations and hence identifies the causal effect of language on political personalised trust. The goal is to examine the extent to which the use of different language varieties in a multilingual setting such as Catalonia (native Catalan, native Spanish, Catalan as a second language, Spanish as a second language) affects the hearer’s evaluation of the speaker in terms of political trust and to analyse how the social features of the hearer (political preferences, and first language) moderate their political trust towards the speakers of the different varieties. Our article seeks to make a contribution not only to a hitherto unexplored question but also to both our understanding of how an important element in political communication (language) affects people’s political trust. Additionally, we also aim to analyse to what extend this might be normatively problematic for any theory of democracy. From a normative-philosophical standpoint, if political messages are filtered differently because of language, this might compromise the realization of crucial democratic principles. Political theorists working on democratic theory and the relevance of deliberation (e.g. Mansbridge et al 2012) argue that democracy implies a minimal commitment to the idea that all citizens are equally credible participants who require reasons when discussing how to organize our societies. If this does not occur and people engage in linguistic discrimination and bias, this might be normatively challenging for our democratic system, because some people might feel excluded from being seen as "eligible", "credible" or "hearable". In this regard, our experimental study aims to develop a normative analysis of the arguments raised by the respondents of the questionnaire. The idea is to ask, at the end of the questionnaire, whether language bias played a role in respondents’ responses to the questionnaire and which conception of linguistic justice (either merely instrumental or identitarian; De Schutter 2007) they endorse. Using that information, we will be able to check to what extend people’s endorsement to a particular conception of linguistic justice might compromise fundamental democratic principles as exposed by political theorists working on deliberative democratic theory.