CCL team member Marvin Stecker recently published a new study titled "Moral Foundation Measurements Fail to Converge on Multilingual Party Manifestos" with Frederic R. Hopp in Political Analysis. In it, they compared different possible automated methods to detect moral foundations in political manifestos. They find that, while these measurements draw on the same theoretical concepts, they produce diverging results when scoring the same manifesto. The authors test this both for English-language, as well as multilingual approaches.

Moralising language is a powerful rhetorical tool for signaling political identity, persuading audiences, and mobilising voters. The valid and reliable classification of moral language is therefore a critical objective for political scientists. Recent advances in automated text analysis have introduced myriad new strategies for measuring morality in language, but have often produced conflicting, inconclusive findings. The authors investigate whether this diversity of moral content analyses might partially explain inconclusive findings, using a large corpus of political manifestos in four different languages (N=810 manifestos).

The results show that, despite starting from the same framework of Moral Foundations Theory (MFT), different instruments and underlying methodologies lead to remarkably different results for extracting moral foundations. Reproducing a previous study on political parties’ ideology and their use of moral foundations, the authors find that different measurements can lead to opposite effect directions. They discuss the relevance of the findings for research at the intersection of politics and moral rhetoric using automated text analysis.

Find the full open-access paper here: doi.org/10.1017/pan.2025.10011

Cite the article: Stecker, M., & Hopp, F. R. (2025). Moral Foundation Measurements Fail to Converge on Multilingual Party Manifestos. Political Analysis, 1–22. doi:10.1017/pan.2025.10011