Exploring Nostalgic Rhetoric in UK Parliamentary Speeches Using a LLM
P4-S90-5
Presented by: Pietro Michael Lepidi, Mária Žuffová
Politicians' pledges focus on the future. Yet, Trump's campaign slogan, "Make America Great Again," and Farage's Brexit slogan, "Take back control," referred to the past. Although invoking nostalgia has long been an important element of political strategy, empirical studies examining the extent of nostalgia focus on party manifestos and defining nostalgia as a reference to the past (Müller, 2022; Müller & Proksch, 2024). In this study, we extend this work to a new dataset: parliamentary speeches. In our work, we ask (1) to what extent is nostalgic rhetoric expressed in UK parliamentary speeches between 2009 and 2019 and (2) how the extent of expressed nostalgic rhetoric varies. We used a pre-trained nostalgic detection model trained on political party manifestos (Müller & Proksch, 2024) to detect the nostalgic expression in UK parliamentary speeches. We found that nostalgic rhetoric is only used 1.15% of the time, especially when discussing culture, and by smaller political parties, with the Respect party using nostalgic rhetoric the most on average, with 4.70% of their speeches containing nostalgic rhetoric, followed by APNI (3.12%), and UUP (1.97%). Consistent with previous research, we find culture to be the most prominent topic with nostalgic rhetoric usage (Müller & Proksch, 2024). However, contradictory to previous research (Müller & Proksch, 2024), we do not find culturally conservative parties to use the most nostalgic rhetoric. While nostalgia might play a role in political party manifestos as a political strategy, its role in parliamentary speeches is rare and topic-specific.
Keywords: nostalgia, parliamentary speeches, UK, LLM