Language Structure and Political Ideology: Evidence From the World Value Survey

Yang Zhou, Josh Matti and Nabamita Dutta

Kyklos, 2025, vol. 78, issue 4, 1514-1529

Abstract: This paper studies the relationship between language structure and political ideology. Using several language structure data sets and the World Value Survey data, we test the relationship between linguistic characteristics and political ideologies on democracy for over 150,000 people in countries across the world during the past approximately two decades. We explore the impact of pronoun drop, politeness distinction, and irrealis mood on people's political ideology. In addition to considering the links between these language structures and support for democracy, we also examine how language structures influence what aspects of democracy people care about. Additionally, we also test for heterogeneity by income level and degree of democracy across countries. In considering culture, we conduct mediation analysis with the traits of individualism, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance. Overall, these further tests, along with the robustness tests, support the main results by highlighting the connections between language structures and political ideology.

Date: 2025
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