Mind the Gap? Negative Tweets & Partisanship in the House of Representatives

• In Event: One Vision: Elite Communication Across Platforms

Abstract

How does the lack of institutional legislative and political power and influence in the House of Representatives shape politicians' rhetoric? In previous work, we found evidence that members of Congress in the minority party in the House and in the party opposing the president were more negative in the language that they used on Twitter. This pattern was even stronger when they are a part of the minority in a unified congress. However, the balance of power in the House between Republicans and Democrats is not constant within a single term. We pair the size of the difference between the majority and minority parties in the House as it changes over the course of a term with almost 2 million tweets made by all members of Congress 2014-2020, and by doing so are able to capture the dynamic nature of this political environment and to assess the impact of a representative's political power on her use of strategic negative sentiment in her tweets. The size of this difference has implications for policy-making and the ability to pass legislation in the House, particularly in our polarized political system. How necessary are members of the minority party to achieve these crucial tasks? Is compromise required? Is it likely or even possible (and has its likelihood changed over time)? We assess if the size of this partisan gap, and especially how it represents the extent to which the minority party may be shut out of the political process if compromise between Democrats and Republicans is unlikely or rare, heightens those representatives' already-existing incentives to be negative online in their tweets. Given the increasing contention between the two parties on- and offline, it is unlikely that the use of negative rhetoric and its potentially harmful impact on American government and congress will decrease in the near future.

Authors

• Maggie Macdonald, New York University

• Whitney Hua, University of Southern California