Why So Negative? Emotional Rhetoric and Asymmetric Party Polarization

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

Abstract

Members of Congress are using social media to develop political narratives about their time in office, and we test whether this new media franking privilege is perpetuating patterns of asymmetric party polarization. This paper advances the theory of asymmetric partisanship by extending that behavior from the institution to lawmakers’ public relations activities. We develop a theoretical framework to understand how members of congress are using emotional rhetoric to reach voters through social media. We test our hypotheses using a corpus of congressional tweets over six years to analyze whether Republicans are more likely to use negative, angry political rhetoric more often than their Democratic opponents.

Authors

• Annelise Russell, University of Kentucky

• Whitney Hua, University of Southern California