The Moral Values of Congress: A Computational Analysis of Congressional Speech from 1873-2024

Barcelona, Spain · May 2026

Posters · Identity, Culture & Social Inequality

Meriel Burnett
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Mohammad Atari
University of Massachusetts Amherst

Abstract

We scored 17M congressional hearing utterances (1873–2023) and 438M historical newspapers for 7 Moral Foundation Theory values. Care rose over time across corpora, and Democrats and Republicans displayed distinct moral profiles. Time-lagged regression showed that changes in newspaper moralization (an index of overall moral speech) preceded corresponding shifts in congress.

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The Moral Values of Congress: A Computational Analysis of Congressional Speech from 1873-2024

Abstract

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