Partisan Intensity in Congress: Evidence from Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court Nomination

Abstract

Partisan disputes are ubiquitous in Congress. Yet, participation in this bickering varies among legislators. Some eagerly join these fights while others abstain. What explains this variation? Previous research examines this question by studying members’ partisan preferences expressed through votes or bill cosponsorships. However, preference-based studies miss much of the daily congressional bickering and cannot identify which legislators were most involved in the fighting. This paper considers lawmakers’ partisan intensity, the time and effort they devote to partisanship. I argue the same factors that drive other forms of legislative participation—constituent demand, committee service, and a member’s personal characteristics—also predict who joins a partisan dispute. Using Senators’ daily Twitter communications during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation, I show legislators’ partisan intensity systematically varied based on these factors. In particular, I find that sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh altered Senators’ partisan behavior in a predictable manner. This study helps explain why legislators choose to create the partisan acrimony that is omnipresent on Capitol Hill and contributes to our understanding of partisanship, messaging politics, and how social identity affects legislative participation.

Measuring Congressional Partisanship and Its Consequences

“…Lawmakers' partisan intensity is viewed as a common culprit in producing conflict and dysfunction in Congress. Yet scholars tend to examine how parties work as teams (Gelman 2020a; Koger and Lebo 2017; Lee 2009) or why Senators vary in their partisan actions (Gelman 2020b; Russell 2020; Theriault 2013). Less attention has been paid to how members’ partisan intensity varies throughout Congress and the consequences of this behavior.…”

“…Lee argues members voluntarily act as team players to support their party “in pursuit of collective goals” (2009, 18). Although copartisans might be on the same team, others show they adopt very different partisan styles, which depends on personal characteristics (Sinclair 2006; Theriault 2013), their party (Russell 2018), or institutional factors (Gelman 2020b; Russell 2020).…”

“…This persona of partisan intensity, the time and effort legislators devote to partisan activities, is not merely symbolic but is carefully crafted to appeal to their constituents (Gelman 2020b). From a representation standpoint, partisan displays activate an important identity for the party base (Mason 2018) and “represent voters’ views about how the parties should interact with one another” (Gelman 2020b, 3). Lawmakers deliberately cultivate their personas as partisan firebrands or bipartisan compromisers in order to appeal to their voters back home.…”

The “PERFECT” Call: Congressional Representation by Tweet in the Midst of the Ukraine Whistleblower Scandal

“…First, compared to other widely used forms of congressional communication, like Facebook and newsletters, Twitter content is highly representative of the messages MCs typically relay to their constituents (see Casas & Morar, 2015;also Glassman et al, 2010;Golbeck et al, 2010). Second, in a time of hyper-polarization there is almost no utility in trying to capture the most partisan, divisive, and vocal congresspersons through traditional analytical metrics like roll-call votes (Gelman, 2021). For one, these party-line votes merely demonstrate the unwillingness to defect, but not the intensity of feeling associated with a given stance.…”

“…Votes are the outcome of the process, what we want to know about is which MCs had the most or least to say about the scandal and when they tweeted about it, what was the justification/substance of their statements? Thus, like a handful of recent studies (Gelman, 2021;Russell, 2018Russell, , 2021, we are interested in the substance of congressional communication, and Twitter is an excellent medium for capturing this.…”