How Do Moral Emotions Shape Political Participation? A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Online Petitions Using Language Models (2024)

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.

## introduction moral emotions influence group judgments and behaviors on social issues and further impact political participation @xcite . they drive individuals to collectively act on common issues, deter actions, polarize groups, and can lead to extremism @xcite @xcite . their influence extends beyond the offline realm and affects political discussion on social media @xcite . as online platforms connect vast networks of people, understanding how different types of moral emotions expressed through language affect user actions has become crucial. online petitions are excellent data sources for studying the role of moral emotions on user response because they record the motivations, sentiments, and behaviors of individuals who engage in collective action. we use cross-cultural data to answer the following questions: (1) how can we systematically measure moral emotions? (2) which moral emotions most influence users' political participation? (3) do moral emotions have similar effects across cultures? we collected data from two petition websites with similar designs and social media functions: south korea's blue house national petition and the uk's government and parliament petitions. by utilizing two datasets, we can test the cross-cultural generalizability of our findings on the role of moral emotions in political participation. this paper presents a 5-step framework for analyzing moral emotions (figure 1 ) and shares a dataset of nearly 50,000 sentences in korean and english each. we consider broader emotion categories than previous works @xcite and include: othercondemning, other-praising, other-suffering, selfconscious, neutral, and non-moral emotion (see ## political participation analysis we built a classifier from our fine-grained moral emotion dataset to analyze the entire collection of petitions and performed regression analysis to assess the impact of these emotions on political participation. ## conclusion this study proposed a 5-step framework for analyzing moral emotions and their effects on political participation, leveraging cross-cultural data from online petitions. our framework addresses research gaps using a comprehensive korean and english moral emotion dataset and is adaptable to lowresource languages and topic domains. the dataset, annotated with fine-tuned gpt-3.5, enables training language-specific transformer models, allowing for the precise quantification of moral emotions within the petitions. our analysis reveals that othersuffering enhanced both general and active political participation. in contrast, other-condemning led to polarization in these cultural contexts. patterns of other-praising by countries underscore the cultural difference of moral emotions' influence on political engagement. the discussion of these findings, particularly the pronounced effects of petitions on specific moral emotions, provides valuable insights into the fields of social science and ai.