Moral Foundations Under Digital Pressure: Does Broadband Internet Shift the Moral Language of Local Politicians?

Abstract

We investigate whether broadband internet expansion shifts the moral foundations embedded in local politicians' public speech. Drawing on the LocalView database of local government meeting transcripts , we construct a panel of 530 places across 47 U.S.\ states from 2017 to 2022, encompassing over 82,000 meeting transcripts and 719 million words. We measure moral language along the five Moral Foundations Theory dimensions and map them onto 's universalism-communalism axis. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design with the estimator, we exploit variation in the timing of broadband adoption across places, defining treatment as the first year a place crosses 70 percent household broadband subscription. We find no statistically significant effect of broadband expansion on politicians' moral language. All pre-trend tests pass comfortably ($p > 0.42$ for all nine outcomes), supporting the parallel trends assumption. The null is robust to alternative estimators and treatment thresholds; heterogeneity analysis by partisanship and rurality is limited by the high treatment rate (98% eventually treated), though no subgroup where estimation is feasible shows significant effects. We interpret these findings through the lens of "cheap talk": local government speech may be too ritualistic and low-stakes to respond to informational shocks from internet access.