Intra-Party Division and News Media Engagement Among Republican Legislators

• In Event: Elites, Media, and Public Opinion

Abstract

Partisan polarization and the fragmentation of the public sphere have emerged as notable trends in the study of American politics in recent years. Yet, while a wide range of studies have explored inter-party polarization, markedly less scholarship has been devoted to intra-party cleavages. Similarly, political communication has focused on partisan division in the news media environment but seldom focuses on the nuances within the larger ideological camps. We explore the relationship between these trends at the intra-party level, testing whether ideological cleavages correspond to differences in the way members of Congress engage with news sources. Rather than focus on political parallelism between parties and news media content overall, our approach offers insights into the plurality of voices within parties as well as a more diverse media environment. Foregrounding intra-party differentiation provides a granular view of the emerging differences along ideological lines as they pertain to both partisan actors as well as their preferred media arenas and informational sources.

To evaluate partisans’ positions we use traditional ideal point estimates of legislator preferences including roll-call voting behavior (DW-NOMINATE) and campaign donor preferences (CFscore), combined with manually-coded indicators. These measures serve as proxies for ideological positions. We evaluate media engagement both in terms of output and sourcing, asking; what content are these actors creating, and where are they getting information from? Accordingly, we use hyperlink network analysis (HNA) to reveal differences and similarities in out-links to news sources to better understand how topics emanate from news providers. Given recent developments in the conservative media ecology and the perceived factional division within the party, we focus specifically on cleavages within the Republican Party.

Having assessed the ideological origins of media engagement, we further consider the role of diverse media arenas in fostering intra-party division. Our research is informed by Andrew Chadwick’s concept of the “hybrid media system,” in which political elites may employ the affordances of digital platforms and social media ties in order to selectively engage with traditional and alternative news sources. We therefore draw on social media output and examine ties to online news sites by scraping tweet activity of the all available accounts of Republican legislators in the U.S. Congress since 2016. We isolate media sources referenced via hyperlinks or as social media accounts which are subsequently classified into a predefined typology and into distinct categories. We demonstrate correlation between the media engagement and intra-party positions of legislators, and seek to determine causal relationships between the two phenomena.

Drawing on our original dataset, we show that modes of media engagement and elite-media interaction are strong indicators of intra-party position. We demonstrate that engagement is predictive for both affective divisions, including rhetorical and stylistic differences, and policy-based cleavages based on issue positions. These findings have important consequences for our understanding of sources of intra-party division, theories about elite polarization and party unity, and elite-media interactions. Beyond this, our approach offers a potential avenue towards classification of media sources based on ideological differences between the respective elites that are likely to engage with or share their content. We discuss the implications of our findings as well as potential avenues for further research in different parties or media environments based on our applied methodology.

Authors

• Mike Cowburn, Freie Universität Berlin

• Curd Benjamin Knüpfer, Freie Universität Berlin