Measuring Partisanship and Representation in Online Congressional Communication

The rise of online communication and social media has created new ways for elected officials to communicate with their constituents, but also enabled the diffusion of polarizing partisan rhetoric. How have members of Congress responded to these opportunities? This is the subject of a Center for Effective Lawmaking (CEL) working paper from Associate Professor (and CEL Faculty Affiliate) Michael Kistner, Ph.D. candidates Robert Alvarez, Lucas Lothamer, and Maya Fitch (all of the University of Houston), as well as post-doctoral researcher Michael Heseltine of the University of Amsterdam and Associate Professor Elizabeth Simas of Texas A&M University. The authors introduce a new dataset of congressional communication spanning multiple platforms over a fourteen year time period to answer this question. Using computational text analysis tools, they classify messages on these platforms into purposive categories and scale the partisanship of each message along a continuous dimension ranging from left to right. After validating our measures, they produce two key findings. First, rhetoric by members of Congress has become more partisan and more negative as social media usage has increased. Second, they identify what we call the social media feedback mirage. Messages containing negativity, partisanship, and position-taking receive greater positive feedback on social media, even though experimental and observational evidence suggest voters disapprove of these types of messages. They conclude by discussing the implications for the current state of political discourse.

To learn more, read the full report here.

“Passe-partout (computer, e-mail, online)” by Wies_van_Erp is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.