How Do Moral Emotions Shape Political Participation? A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Online Petitions Using Language Models

Jaehong Kim, Chaeyoon Jeong, Seongchan Park, Meeyoung Cha, Wonjae Lee


Abstract
Understanding the interplay between emotions in language and user behaviors is critical. We study how moral emotions shape the political participation of users based on cross-cultural online petition data. To quantify moral emotions, we employ a context-aware NLP model that is designed to capture the subtle nuances of emotions across cultures. For model training, we construct and share a moral emotion dataset comprising nearly 50,000 petition sentences in Korean and English each, along with emotion labels annotated by a fine-tuned LLM. We examine two distinct types of user participation: general support (i.e., registered signatures of petitions) and active support (i.e., sharing petitions on social media). We discover that moral emotions like other-suffering increase both forms of participation and help petitions go viral, while self-conscious have the opposite effect. The most prominent moral emotion, other-condemning, led to polarizing responses among the audience. In contrast, other-praising was perceived differently by culture; it led to a rise in active support in Korea but a decline in the UK. Our findings suggest that both moral emotions embedded in language and cultural perceptions are critical to shaping the public’s political discourse.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.963
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
16274–16289
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.963
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jaehong Kim, Chaeyoon Jeong, Seongchan Park, Meeyoung Cha, and Wonjae Lee. 2024. How Do Moral Emotions Shape Political Participation? A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Online Petitions Using Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 16274–16289, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
How Do Moral Emotions Shape Political Participation? A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Online Petitions Using Language Models (Kim et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.963.pdf