Who Tweets Populism When? A Big-Data Analysis of Congressional Twitter Use

• In Event: Going Negative, Populist, or Fake

Abstract

A growing body of work aims to measure political elites’ use of populist rhetoric in traditional and digital media. This paper supplements this literature by addressing relationships between electoral proximity, ideological extremism, and populist rhetoric among members of Congress on Twitter. Using document embedding models, I treat the measurement of this communication style as a rare events problem, finding significant – but asymmetric – relationships between ideological extremism, proximity to elections, and members’ use of populist rhetoric. This paper’s contributions are twofold. Substantively, it provides strong evidence that populism is a communication tool used disproportionately by ideologically extreme politicians – particularly those on the right. It also finds that populist rhetoric is a tool used disproportionately in the immediate lead-up to elections. Methodologically, this paper provides a replicable process by which to quantitatively describe and analyze ideologically-driven political communication in imbalanced datasets.

Author

• Andrew Elias Strasberg, Washington University in St. Louis