Incivility in Austrian Parliamentary Debates: A Supervised Sentiment Analysis of Parliamentary Speeches

Incivility of political communication has become a major topic in scientific and public discourse, and is often attributed to an increase of political polarization or voter disaffection with politics and democracy. However, there is no agreement on the definition or measurement of incivility, yet. Our paper proposes automated sentiment analysis to identify uncivil language and to measure the level of (in)civility in parliamentary speeches. We validate this automated measurement by comparing automatic and human codings of speeches. Substantively, we study incivility in the Austrian national parliament during the last two decades and explore political and contextual factors that could affect its level in parliamentary debates. We test, whether government/opposition status, the frontbench/backbench position of MPs, the type of debate or temporal patterns such as approaching elections have an effect on the level of civility observed in parliament.