Measuring Congressional Partisanship and Its Consequences

Abstract

We develop a method for measuring a legislator’s partisanship using their Twitter rhetoric. To do so, we classify over 2.1 million tweets sent during two congressional terms (2015 through 2018) to determine how often members use explicitly partisan language. Since lawmakers are strategic in how they communicate with the public, we argue our approach captures a member’s partisan intensity, the time and effort they devote to supporting their party. After validating our measure, we examine how partisanship affects commonly studied legislative behaviors. We show it predicts, independent of ideology, a lawmaker’s party‐unity voting and expressed bipartisanship. Additionally, we find that presidential support is principally driven by partisanship, not ideology. Our findings offer two contributions. First, we show that a member’s partisanship, based on how they talk about Democrats and Republicans online, is associated with their legislative behavior. Second, we measure a concept that is difficult to operationalize.

The search for solid ground in text as data: A systematic review and practical recommendations for validation

“…Examples of contextual labels ranged from committee (Fernandes et al, 2019;Greene & Cross, 2017;Rossiter, 2022) and party labels (Bruinsma & Gemenis, 2019;Lauderdale & Herzog, 2016), labels from legislative data or parliamentary transcripts, to mentions in newspapers (Gelman & Wilson, 2022).…”

“…This form of validation was especially popular for unsupervised methods, whereas no form of this validation could be found in any of the dictionary studies. Examples of external criteria predicted by the text-based measures ranged from specific events (e.g., parliament disputes based on the language used, see Gelman & Wilson (2022)) to other forms of observable behaviour, such as politicians roll-call votes (I. S. Kim et al, 2018;Lauderdale & Herzog, 2016;Rheault & Cochrane, 2020).…”

Attention to the COVID‐19 Pandemic on Twitter: Partisan Differences Among U.S. State Legislators

“…Partisanship was one of the primary determinants of how U.S. Congress members framed the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in their tweets (Wright, Clark, and Evans 2021). In the 115th Congress, the average legislator devoted 22% of their tweets to partisan rhetoric (Gelman and Wilson 2021). Given the highly politicized nature of the pandemic (Green et al .…”