What does this research mean for the field?

Responsibility rhetoric in party manifestos is primarily utilized by moderating parties to justify policy deviations and by large incumbent parties to claim credit, whereas populist and niche parties actively avoid it. Novelty: ClaimNovelty.INCREMENTAL. Consensus alignment: ConsensusAlignment.NEUTRAL.

What question did this study set out to answer?

To examine how political parties employ responsibility rhetoric—appeals to national solidarity and public interest—to justify policy moderation or claim credit for governance.

September 3, 2026European Journal of Political ResearchOpen Access

The rhetoric of responsibility in party manifestos (1980–2021)

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Authors

ACAndrea CerónUniversity of Milan ASAlessio ScopellitiUniversity of Milan

Discussion

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Implication

Computational text analysis reveals responsibility rhetoric in manifestos from governing parties across 38 countries, indicating strategic framing to justify policy moderation.

Key Points

To examine how political parties employ responsibility rhetoric—appeals to national solidarity and public interest—to justify policy moderation or claim credit for governance.
Analyzed sentence-level text across 1,927 party manifestos spanning 1980 to 2021 in 38 countries.
Classified text into Comparative Manifesto Project categories using the manifestoberta large language model.
Refined classification of responsibility rhetoric using semisupervised Latent Dirichlet Allocation (Seeded-LDA) and the GPT-4o-mini large language model.
Policy-moderating parties and large incumbent parties significantly increased their usage of responsibility rhetoric to justify ideological shifts and claim credit for governing.
Populist and niche political parties systematically avoided responsibility rhetoric, prioritizing direct responsiveness to their voter base over broad public-interest framing.

Cite This Study

Cerón et al. (2026) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/6a9935d8636c6408cfa7e6cd https://doi.org/10.1017/s1475676526101674

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September 3, 2026European Journal of Political ResearchOpen Access

The rhetoric of responsibility in party manifestos (1980–2021)

View Full Paper

Ask AI

Bookmark

Authors

ACAndrea CerónUniversity of Milan ASAlessio ScopellitiUniversity of Milan

Discussion

Member takes

Implication

Computational text analysis reveals responsibility rhetoric in manifestos from governing parties across 38 countries, indicating strategic framing to justify policy moderation.

Key Points

To examine how political parties employ responsibility rhetoric—appeals to national solidarity and public interest—to justify policy moderation or claim credit for governance.
Analyzed sentence-level text across 1,927 party manifestos spanning 1980 to 2021 in 38 countries.
Classified text into Comparative Manifesto Project categories using the manifestoberta large language model.
Refined classification of responsibility rhetoric using semisupervised Latent Dirichlet Allocation (Seeded-LDA) and the GPT-4o-mini large language model.
Policy-moderating parties and large incumbent parties significantly increased their usage of responsibility rhetoric to justify ideological shifts and claim credit for governing.
Populist and niche political parties systematically avoided responsibility rhetoric, prioritizing direct responsiveness to their voter base over broad public-interest framing.

Cite This Study

Cerón et al. (2026) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/6a9935d8636c6408cfa7e6cd https://doi.org/10.1017/s1475676526101674

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