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

Abstract Focusing on the responsibility–responsiveness dilemma, we analyze responsibility rhetoric (defined as the emphasis on elements such as national solidarity, the public interest, and public-spiritedness), hypothesizing that it is used by parties moderating their policy positions, to justify deviations from their traditional standpoints, as well as by large incumbent parties seeking to claim credit for their responsible actions. In contrast, populist and niche parties, which prioritize responsiveness, are expected to avoid such rhetoric. We apply the manifestoberta Large Language Model (LLM) to classify natural sentences from up to 1,927 party manifestos (1980–2021), covering 38 countries worldwide, into the traditional MARPOR/Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) coding categories. We then adopt two methods, a semisupervised Latent Dirichlet allocation topic model (Seeded-LDA) and the OpenAI GPT-4o-mini LLM, to refine one of these categories by selecting only those sentences that align with our concept of responsibility rhetoric. The results of statistical analysis support our hypotheses and are robust across different operationalizations of the dependent variable.