Morale in Political Campaigning: Are Political Candidates’ Moral Concerns Coherent with Their Campaign Rhetoric?

Political elites increasingly use moral language to influence voting decisions by signaling moral concerns. Yet, it remains unknown whether political candidates’ moral language use correlates with their endorsed moral beliefs. Previous research with citizens showed that moral values do not always align with moral expressions, raising the question of to what extent candidates’ self-reported moral foundations correspond with the moral foundations present in their campaign communication. To this end, we developed a research program combining candidate surveys and annotations of these candidates’ campaign communication. We collected survey data on the moral foundations of political candidates (N = 949) running for office in four German state elections, as well as these candidates’ Meta posts (N = 17,646 observations). We conducted crowd-sourced annotations of the posts (N = 320 coders) to fine-tune a transformer model that predicts moral labels for the entire corpus. Results show that candidates tend to express the moral concerns they indicate they endorse in their campaign communication. The study also finds variation in the coherence across the political spectrum, both at the individual and the party level. Parties on the political left and the extreme political right show significantly greater coherence than centrist and liberal-conservative parties.