Speaking their language?: Multilingualism in party communication across democracies

The forthcoming article “Speaking their language?: Multilingualism in party communication across democracies” by Taishi Muraoka, Dahjin Kim, Christopher Lucas, Jacob Montgomery, and Margit Tavits is summarized by the author(s) below.

Our study examines how political parties navigate linguistic diversity in modern democracies. Naturally, multilingual political communication only emerges in settings where multiple languages are spoken. However, we find that even in multilingual societies, parties don’t always communicate in the languages of all their constituents. This selective approach to language use has important implications for democratic discourse and outcomes, as language barriers can limit political participation and representation. Our research seeks to understand this variation in linguistic representation at the party level.

Through an analysis of millions of Facebook posts from over 800 political parties across 87 democracies, we provide the first comprehensive look at multilingual political communication on a global scale. Using computational methods to detect and classify languages, we identified that approximately 12% of parties regularly communicate in multiple languages. However, this pattern varies significantly across countries, and we found that it was influenced by two key factors: electoral systems and party ideology.

The electoral system plays a crucial role. In countries with majoritarian systems, where parties need to win a majority of votes in their district, parties are more likely to communicate in multiple languages compared to proportional systems. This reflects the strategic necessity of building broader coalitions in majoritarian systems.

Party ideology emerges as another significant factor. Left-leaning parties, particularly those emphasizing social and cultural issues, are more likely to employ multilingual communication than right-leaning parties.

Our research also examined individual political candidates, analyzing their social media communication during election periods in twelve multilingual democracies. The data shows that candidates from multilingual parties are more likely to communicate in multiple languages themselves, suggesting that party-level language policies are correlated with candidate behavior.

These findings have important implications for understanding political representation in linguistically diverse societies. They demonstrate how institutional structures and party characteristics shape communication strategies, ultimately affecting how different language communities access political discourse.

This research opens new avenues for investigating the relationship between language and political representation, including how parties’ language choices evolve over time and their impact on voter behavior and political participation.

About the Author(s): Taishi Muraoka is an Assistant Research Fellow at the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica in Taiwan, Dahjin Kim is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis, Christopher Lucas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and a faculty affiliate with the Division of Computational & Data Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, Jacob Montgomery is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at WashU and chair of the political science concentration for the newly formed Division of Computational and Data Sciences, and Margit Tavits is a Professor of Political Science and the Dr. William Taussig Professor in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Their research “Speaking their language?: Multilingualism in party communication across democracies” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.