Voicing Politics: How Language Shapes Public Opinion

“Significant and engaging. I know of no other empirical work that effectively demonstrates how language can shape our political attitudes, or that so persuasively shows how the effects of language differ from those of culture.”—Ewa A. Golebiowska, author of The Many Faces of Tolerance

“An important contribution to the discipline. Voicing Politics bridges the insights of linguistics and public-opinion scholarship, highlighting the linkages between the language people speak and the political views they espouse.”—Cecilia Hyunjung Mo, University of California, Berkeley

“Pérez and Tavits provide a remarkable account of the influence of language on political attitudes. In this original and creative book, they put forth a compelling and insightful argument using different experimental approaches, showing how language facilitates the processing of information in ways that shape political preferences.”—Amaney A. Jamal, Princeton University

“Voicing Politics is exhilarating in its creativity and ambition, testing the provocative thesis that language is not just something humans invented to describe the world, but a fundamental cause of how they see the world in the first place. Now, for the first time, Pérez and Tavits provide concrete evidence that each language may uniquely shape the way its speakers think about politics. Surely a must-read for political psychologists of race and ethnicity.”—Nicholas Valentino, University of Michigan