Longitudinal Effects of Elite-level Affective Polarizing Content on Social Media

• In Event: The Great Divide: Information, Communication, and Polarization

Abstract

While most studies have focused on social media incivility from the citizens’ perspective, less emphasis has been placed on the supply side (i.e. the politicians). In this paper we build on findings stemming from two experiments showing that political elites’ style of posting on social media may often stimulate uncivil responses, and test this assumption in a dynamic way using longitudinal Twitter data tracking responses to members of the United States Congress for a year. We train a machine-learning classifier that allows us to empirically test whether affective polarizing tweets by members of Congress tend to generate more uncivil responses by users when compared to non-polarizing tweets. Our findings show a positive correlation between affective polarizing tweets and uncivil responses, raising significant questions about the role of affective polarization and uncivil speech as intentional political communication strategies. The democratic consequences of such a development are discussed.

Authors

• Yannis Theocharis, Technical University of Munich

• Spyros Kosmidis, University of Oxford