The Language of Politics

Turn on Fox News on any given night, and you'll hear pundits blasting illegal aliens, radical Islamic terrorism, and corporate regulations.

Change the channel to MSNBC, and you'll hear talk of undocumented immigrants, jihadism, and consumer protections.

The two networks are talking about the same issues, but they're using strikingly different terms.

At the heart of this is a struggle between conservatives and liberals over how to label just about every issue in politics. Behind the scenes, experts from both parties are busy devising and testing new ways to frame hot-button issues designed to pull voters further into their camps.

The divide has shown no signs of narrowing, and it has left observers wondering how to find common ground when even our language is polarized.

"Every tribe has its own words, basically, and it becomes more and more difficult to have conversations across tribal fault lines if we can't even agree on the terminology," Dietram Scheufele, a communications professor at the University of Wisconsin, told Business Insider.

In 1994, House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich's "Contract for America" changed the course of political rhetoric. AP Photo/John Duricka

Given today's political climate, it may seem as if the language of politics has been polarized forever, but the phenomenon is relatively new. Until the 1990s, conservatives and liberals spoke remarkably similarly, a study by a trio of researchers from Stanford, Brown, and Microsoft found in 2016.

In the study, participants were shown speeches by members of Congress from 1873 to 2016 and asked to guess whether the speech was given by a Republican or a Democrat. When the speech was given in years before the 1990s, participants correctly guessed the party only slightly more than half the time. But that figure spiked dramatically in 1994, and by 2010 participants' guesses were correct 73% of the time.

Read more at Business Insider