Political dogwhistles and semantic change in Swedish politics

Abstract

This article investigates how citizens’ understanding of multivocal political words – dogwhistles – changes over time and varies between groups. Dogwhistles are ambiguous political messages that convey a veiled meaning to a targeted subset of the audience but are inaudible to others. They present challenges from the standpoint of democratic representation and the principles of open and informed deliberation. We use survey data from a two-wave panel word replacement test, in which respondents were asked to replace a word or multiple words in a sentence so that the meaning of the sentence remained about the same. Manual coding was used to separate dogwhistle payload replacement words from replacement words with the explicit meaning. Comparing the replacement test in the two waves and between groups, we chart the life cycle of dogwhistles and explore group differences in the ability to decode their implicit payload. We find examples of both dogwhistle semantic stability and change. The analysis demonstrated an increase in the share of respondents who inferred ‘good order in migration policy' as meaning stricter migration policy between the two waves. The likelihood of decoding the implicit dogwhistle message was linked to individual-level factors, such as age, party affiliation, social media and radical right-wing media use. By exploring semantic change using a novel approach, this paper leaves a unique contribution to the study of strategic ambiguity in political communication.

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