Reducing Toxicity among Elites: The Case of the US

• In Event: Elite Rhetoric: Polarizing, Emotional, and/or Toxic

Abstract

The potential effect of elites’ toxic language (e.g., hate speech, dehumanizing opponents, delegitimizing institutions) on democracy has never been more apparent. This project aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the consequences of this phenomenon and explore potential solutions. Given this pernicious linkage, one can naturally ask what can be done — can we ameliorate this toxic speech among political elites? Building on recent experimental work on political elites, we simply asked: 1. Does bottom-up social sanctioning reduce politicians’ online toxic speech? 2. Does top-down monitoring reduce politicians’ online toxic speech? The former arm of our research builds on the well-developed idea that social sanctioning may effectively reduce prejudiced behavior (Rasinski and Czopp, 2010; Munger 2017), while the latter extends existing work on elite monitoring (Grossman and Hanlon, 2014; Grossman and Michelitch, 2018; Nyhan and Reifler, 2015) to a new domain (toxic campaign speech in this case), and examines the efficiency of a low-cost monitoring modality. To investigate our key questions in the US, we focused on the major party candidates for federal and state legislative office in the 2022 Midterm Election and conducted a pair of preregistered randomized controlled trials between October 13 and December 15 (N: 3560). We find a statistically significant effect of monitoring, but social sanctioning – which were seemed to work with regular people (Munger 2017) - appear to backfire when applied to elites. These interventions provide a challenging but clear, low-cost, quick, and flexible recipe to policymakers for reducing the negativity of political campaigns.

Authors

• Yunus E Orhan, Denison University

• Valeriya Mechkova, Varieties of Democracy, Gothenburg University

• Daniel Pemstein, North Dakota State University

• Brigitte Seim, University of Minnesota

• Steven Lloyd Wilson, Brandeis University