A university study finds that ideological and emotional polarization has increased in investiture debates since 2015

Researchers from the School of Communication University of Navarra have analyzed more than two decades of investiture debates in the Chamber of Deputies ( congress ) to assess how the tone of political speech in Spain has changed. The study concludes that polarization—both ideological and emotional—has clearly increased since 2015, coinciding with the end of the traditional two-party system. They have detected more insults, more appeals to “us” versus “them,” and calls for dialogue that are increasingly strategic rather than sincere.

The study “ research,” authored by Aurken Sierra, Jordi Rodríguez-Virgili, and Clara González-Tosat, combines a guide analysis of parliamentary conference proceedings with automated text analysis tools. In total, 83 speeches by 11 candidates (including José María Aznar, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Mariano Rajoy, Pedro Sánchez, and Alberto Núñez Feijóo) were analyzed across the 21 investiture sessions held between 2000 and 2023.

From "dialogue with the entire chamber" to the logic of blocs

According to the study, during the period of the two-party system (2000–2011), candidates typically addressed the entire chamber with appeals to “ agreement ” that transcended party affiliations. The emergence of Ciudadanos and Podemos in 2015—and later of Vox—upset that balance: from then on, speeches began to be structured increasingly around the distinction between “us” and “them,” and explicit references to the “left” and “right” skyrocketed.

The researchers also document the emergence of expressions such as “far right” and “far left”—which were absent from debates prior to 2015—as well as an increasing use of derogatory terms, such as “enemies,” “fascists,” “traitors,” or “ministers of the dictatorship,” directed at political opponents, especially beginning in 2019.

The Paradox of Dialogue

One of the most striking findings of * work * is what the authors call “the paradox of dialogue”: references to “agreement ” and “pact” reached an all-time high precisely during the failed investitures of 2016, when the candidates knew they did not have the necessary votes. For the researchers, this suggests that many calls for consensus function more as gestures aimed at public opinion than as genuine attempts at negotiation.

The rise in hostility is also reflected in the dynamics of the chamber, with a B increase in applause, protests, and murmurs on the floor since 2016. According to the authors, the chamber itself has become a stage where loyalty or animosity toward political opponents is played out in real time.

"Investiture debates are not inherently confrontational; their institutional function is to build parliamentary trust. What our data show is that, since the fragmentation of the party system, that space has gradually been filled with language that is increasingly focused on identity and less oriented toward real agreement . At final, the parliamentary speech has become clearly polarized, even in less confrontational debates such as those on the formation of a government,” explains Aurken Sierra, researcher at the School of Communication and lead author of the study.

About the study

The research, titled“Political Polarization and Noise in Spanish Investiture Debates (2000–2023),” has been published in the issue 31(1) of the journal *Historia y Comunicación Social* (Ediciones Complutense). The team combined coding guide following Bardin’s content analysis methodology with natural language processing in Python, which allowed them to quantify and validate on a large scale the patterns detected qualitatively in the conference proceedings of the congress.