Bringing in the Sheaves: How the Christian Right Talks Up Elected Officials

• In Event: Religion and Right-Wing Populism

Abstract

It has long been known that interest groups are important components providing support for elected officials, primarily through the donation of funds, provision of information, and the sponsorship of political advertising. One additional avenue has been blind to researchers because of access: Whether and how they talk about officials through communication directed to members. There is good reason to think that email traffic would contain communication about champions and enemies, but also that email communication might differ qualitatively from what makes it into press releases due to audience effects. The two audiences are responsive to different kinds of arguments and information, with members more responsive to threat than reward. In order to assess this expectation, we mine a trove of 2,056 emails the Family Research Council (FRC) sent to list subscribers from 2007 (when the lead author subscribed) to the present as well as nearly 3,000 emails sent from 7 other groups. Text tools, including key words and topic modeling, allow us to depict the flux of how these Christian Right groups talk about elected officials to their memberships in private emails. We compare the email patterns to their public communication from the last four years of press releases from the FRC.

Authors

• Paul A. Djupe, Denison University

• Angelia R. Wilson, University of Manchester