Assessing Moral Hierarchies through the Shades of Intolerance: A Comparative Analysis of Political Discourse in Belgium and the United States related to migrants and LGBTQIA+ communities

This article examines how different shades of intolerance operate distinctively yet interrelatedly in political discourse. Drawing on social psychology and moral foundations theory, it argues that political science and political communication can benefit from integrating these conceptual tools to better understand the moral and emotional dynamics underlying toxic and hate speech. The study distinguishes between incivility and intolerance as components of “toxic content,” emphasizing that intolerance poses a deeper threat because it targets collective identities rather than individuals. To operationalize this framework, a comprehensive codebook was developed to manually code tweets posted by politicians on X (formerly Twitter), identifying and classifying potential expressions of intolerance directed toward migrants and the LGBTQIA+ community. Based on this manual coding, we fine-tuned a tweet classification model to enable large-scale detection and categorization of intolerance in political discourse. Empirically, the analysis focuses on tweets from Belgian political parties (2023–2025) and U.S. Congress members (2017–2023), offering a comparative perspective on the moral and emotional architectures shaping contemporary communication. Normatively, the research shows how political discourse can evolve from performative moral positioning toward explicit calls for exclusion or harm, stressing the need to monitor how intolerance becomes normalized in democratic societies.