Speaking their language?: Multilingualism in party communication across democracies

Abstract

Which parties embrace multilingualism in their communication? Despite growing interest in parties’ multilingualism among normative scholars of deliberative democracy, empirical research has largely overlooked the linguistic aspect of party competition. We leverage large-scale data on Facebook posts by more than 800 parties in 87 democracies and analyze their day-to-day language practices. By so doing, we develop, for the first time, the classification of monolingual and multilingual parties around the world. Moreover, using this novel dataset, we explore what factors are associated with parties’ adoption of multilingualism and how multilingual parties predict the language use of candidates they nominate. Overall, this study provides the most comprehensive picture of parties’ multilingualism in contemporary democracies and sets agendas for future research in the intersection of parties and language representation.