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

Abstract

In this article we examine every tweet congresspersons sent from the time the media broke the news of President Trump’s fateful July 2019 phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky up to a week after House Speaker Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry. Our aim is to understand the type of rhetoric Members of Congress (MCs) engaged in with respect to what we call the Ukraine Whistleblower Scandal (UWS). It is evident from our analysis that Democrats were more likely to sound off on the UWS, which comports with the fact that it was a Republican President who got into trouble. Further, there are characteristics of MCs that make them more likely to frame and discuss the UWS in certain ways, like House Representatives holding law degrees or serving on one of the House committees investigating the UWS. Finally, in this age of hyper-polarized parties, party affiliation was consistently the most important factor shaping representatives’ Twitter statements on the UWS. In historical perspective, the overriding importance of party affiliation is lamentable since the charges against President Trump were solemn and serious.

(Re)shaping online narratives: when bots promote the message of President Trump during his first impeachment

“…For a detailed description of the Ukraine Whistleblower Scandal, we refer the readers to a recent analysis by McKee and colleagues who also contextualize this situation within the broader matter of hyper-polarization ( McKee, Evans & Clark, 2022 ). A short overview is as follows.…”

“…The specific contribution of our study is to complement existing (predominantly manual) analyses of tweets during the first impeachment, which often focused on tweets from Donald Trump ( Gould, 2021 ; Driver, 2021 ) or Senators ( McKee, Evans & Clark, 2022 ), by using machine learning to examine the role of bots in a large collection of tweets. This complementary analysis has explicitly been called for in recent publications ( Tachaiya et al, 2021 ), which performed large-scale sentiment analyses during the first impeachment ( via Reddit and 4chan), but did not investigate the efforts at social engineering deployed via bots.…”

Do Scandals Matter?

“…However, the start and end of scandals are endogenously determined by the behavior of an individual. The role of the media, especially social media, is important because the framing, especially in later eras, is partisan (and therefore predictable) and often gendered (Clark and Evans 2020;McKee, Evans, and Clark 2021). 11.…”

“…Specifically, partisanship limits the negative impact of scandals (Entman 2012; Dziuda and Howell 2020; Wolsky 2022; Funck and McCabe 2021). Partisans stress different messages about scandals based upon partisanship (McKee, Evans, and Clark 2021) and may rake in additional campaign contributions from party faithful (Hamel and Miller 2018). More media coverage may also simply generate “white noise” that the public ignores (Lawrence, Bennett, and Hunt 1999) or ambivalent reactions that “all politicians do it” (Tiffen 1999).…”

How Much Is a Trump Endorsement Worth?

“…With the party label constant and the presence of several candidates, an endorsement from a high-profile actor can be a helpful and efficient tool for primary voters to draw upon in forming their decision (Grossman and Helpman 1999;Pease and Brewer 2008;Garthwaite and Moore 2013). Enter Donald Trump, a businessman, celebrity, and political figure whose presidential popularity among Republican voters achieved all-time highs while also registering the most polarized partisan disparities in approval ever recorded by the Gallup Poll (Jacobson 2021;McKee, Evans, and Clark 2022). With universal name recognition and an enduring hold over the Grand Old Party because of his continued involvement in politics after losing reelection in 2020, a Trump endorsement should have been influential in Republican primary contests.…”