The Psychological Underpinnings of Conservative/Liberal Ideology in the Australian Federal Parliament: A Computational Linguistic Analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to examine the psychological elements of the ideology of members of the major parties in the Australian federal parliament using computational linguistics. The cohort consists of the 485 Labor, Liberal and National parliamentarians who were in parliament over the period April 1996 to July 2014. I use computational linguistics to extract linguistic variables from first speeches in parliament of those in the cohort. I draw from methods used in machine learning to develop a classifier which has a 74% out of sample (leave-one-out cross validation) accuracy in classifying parliamentarians as liberal (ALP) or conservative (Liberal/National Party Coalition). I then examine the salient variables and find that there are only six linguistic markers of conservative/liberal ideology. Of these, two are consistent with the previous findings that liberals tend to display more psychological 'openness' than conservatives and less psychological 'conscientiousness'. However, one of these variables strongly challenges the idea that conservatives look to the past and liberals to the future. Two of the six linguistic variables are 'suppressor' variables and I discuss these variables in the context of their role in suppressing 'irrelevant' variance in the other independent variables.