Party Messaging in the U.S. House of Representatives

Abstract

Both Congressional parties compete to promote their own reputations while damaging the opposition party’s brand. This behavior affects both policy-making agendas and the party members’ communications with the media and constituents. While there has been ample study of partisan influence on legislative agenda-setting and roll call voting behavior, much less is known about the parties’ efforts to shape the public debate. This paper analyzes two strategic decisions of parties: the timing of collective efforts to influence the public policy debate and the substantive content of these “party messaging” events. These dynamics are analyzed using a unique dataset of 50,195 one-minute speeches delivered on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1989 to 2016. We find a pattern of strategic matching—both parties are more likely to engage in concurrent messaging efforts, often on the same issue.

Cross-Platform Partisan Positioning in Congressional Speech

“…Descriptive work on Facebook shows that Democratic and Republican members focus on separate topics and post at different rates (Glassman, Straus, and Shogan 2013), with similar dynamics emerging in legislators' use of press releases (Grimmer 2013) and e-newsletters (Cormack 2017b;Marin Hellwege and Cormack 2022). This work echoes research on the use of one-minute speeches, which finds that their use varies by member characteristics, such as seniority and extremity (Maltzman and Sigelman 1996;Morris 2001;Pearson and Dancey 2011;Rocca 2007), that they are coordinated by each party (Gilmour 1995;Harris 2005) and that the parties respond to each other in what issues they discuss (Hughes 2018;Hughes and Koger 2021), at least those during morning debate, which are more-so focused on policy than other periods where members use them to recognize members or groups of their district. 3 For more information on one-minutes speeches, see: Oleszek (2013), Maltzman andSigelman (1996), andHughes (2018).…”

Analyzing Support for U.S. Presidential Candidates in Twitter Polls

“…To begin with, the positioning of vote options in such polls may be biased and this bias can influence social poll results, similarly to how it influences traditional poll results (Strack, 1992). Further, the opinions of specific demographics can be overrepresented because (i) Twitter users are more likely to be male and young (Mislove et al, 2011;Wojcik and Hughes, 2019), and (ii) politically-interested users are non-representative of all users (Hughes and Asheer, 2019;Hughes, 2021). Finally, the prevalence of bot accounts, astroturfing campaigns, and artificially-acquired likes and comments, might distort various aspects of Twitter activity including social polls (Keller et al, 2020a;Ferrara et al, This resulted in 4,551 polls.…”