Similar Moral Values, Different Agendas? U.S. Politicians’ Use of Moral Language Is Issue-Specific

What moral values do politicians on the right and left invoke in their rhetoric, and do they emphasize different issues when appealing to these values? We used Structured Topic Models (STM) combined with a word embedding model to examine U.S. politicians’ use of moral language and identify the issues Democrats and Republicans moralize most on X (formerly Twitter). Analyzing 1,578,057 posts from U.S. members of Congress (2019–2023), we found that (1) Democrats and Republicans did not differ meaningfully in what kinds of moral language they used but that (2) they used moral language for different issues. For example, Republicans used language reflecting harm and care to criticize Democratic economic policies, whereas Democrats used it to criticize Trump’s immigration policies. These findings suggest that politicians on the right and left rhetorically invoke similar moral values but do so to highlight different issues.