2023
By Frederic Hopp and Linda Bos
This project investigates the use of moral foundations by Dutch political elites on social media. We will collect all social media posts from Dutch party leaders and parties posted between January 2021 and May 2023, and subsequently use crowd-coding to obtain annotated moral foundations on a subset of these posts. We then fine-tune a cross-language BERT model (XLM-R) on a corpus of English Tweets annotated for moral foundations and test how well this model can classify moral foundations in our crowd-sourced Dutch social media posts. In addition, we aim to computationally explore and classify the visual cues that accompany and undergird the moral language of Dutch political elites.