Uncovering anti-politics by counting hyperbole: level, orientation, and ideology of rhetorical exaggeration

It is often said that political rhetoric is characterized by a high degree of exaggeration. What is known as hyperbole has most often been approached from a linguistic and literary angle; research methods and empirical studies on political hyperbole are scarce. The objective of this article is to test a new integrated methodological framework for rhetorical exaggeration in a contemporary political case. The case examines ideological and government-opposition differences in hyperbolic parliamentary rhetoric. This article details how to identify hyperbole, and how to estimate the level and orientation of hyperbolic rhetoric. We combine quantitative and qualitative content analysis on a large representative sample ( N > 106,000 words) of (2006–2011) debates in the Flemish-Belgian Parliament to test the findings of our two studies with 2006–2013 ( N >160,000 words) and 2010–2014 ( N > 200 randomly selected paragraphs ) Dutch parliamentary rhetoric. Results show that, both ideological (far right vs. center) and party role's differences (opposition vs. government) turn hyperbole into a radical and an explicitly negative rhetorical figure in political language.