United States politicians’ tone became more negative with 2016 primary campaigns

Abstract

There is a widespread belief that the tone of political debate in the US has become more negative recently, in particular when Donald Trump entered politics. At the same time, there is disagreement as to whether Trump changed or merely continued previous trends. To date, data-driven evidence regarding these questions is scarce, partly due to the difficulty of obtaining a comprehensive, longitudinal record of politicians’ utterances. Here we apply psycholinguistic tools to a novel, comprehensive corpus of 24 million quotes from online news attributed to 18,627 US politicians in order to analyze how the tone of US politicians’ language as reported in online media evolved between 2008 and 2020. We show that, whereas the frequency of negative emotion words had decreased continuously during Obama’s tenure, it suddenly and lastingly increased with the 2016 primary campaigns, by 1.6 pre-campaign standard deviations, or 8% of the pre-campaign mean, in a pattern that emerges across parties. The effect size drops by 40% when omitting Trump’s quotes, and by 50% when averaging over speakers rather than quotes, implying that prominent speakers, and Trump in particular, have disproportionately, though not exclusively, contributed to the rise in negative language. This work provides the first large-scale data-driven evidence of a drastic shift toward a more negative political tone following Trump’s campaign start as a catalyst. The findings have important implications for the debate about the state of US politics.

Evolution of Brazilian Democracy: Unveiling Election Dynamics in Political Issues, Negativity, and Acclaim

“…In this context, substantive political discussions are overshadowed by emotionally charged and sometimes misleading content in the digital environment (Bene et al, 2022). Consequently, political campaigns have become increasingly negative over time (Haselmayer et al, 2019;Külz et al, 2023). This trend has been partially attributed to negativity bias, as individuals tend to pay more attention to negative content than positive information (Antypas et al, 2023;Meffert et al, 2006;Schöne et al, 2021).…”

Quotatives Indicate Decline in Objectivity in U.S. Political News

“…Tan, Peng, and Smith (2018) showed a declining trend of bipartisan quote coverage with a bipartite graph of media outlets and the sentences they quoted. Külz et al (2022) analyzed the quotes of U.S politicians between 2008 and 2020 and found a decrease in negativity during Obama's tenure and a sudden increase starting from Trump's presidential primary campaign in 2015. Relationship with prior work.…”

“…Quotebank contains over 235 million unique quotes, extracted from 196 million English news articles from 377 thousand web domains between September 2008 and April 2020. We additionally obtain a list of current and former U.S. politicians with their party affiliations from Wikidata, in the same fashion as Külz et al (2022). We filter Quotebank to consider the period containing the best-quality speaker attributions (May 2013 to 2020) and retain only quotes from politicians on this list.…”

“…Recent years were marked by increased political polarization (Abramowitz and Saunders 2008), mistrust in media (Brenan 2022), increased negative tone by politicians (Külz et al 2022), and the perception that the public debate around politics has become less respectful and less factbased (Doherty et al 2019). Solutions to these issues are complex, but analyzing the bias and the departure from journalistic objectivity in political news coverage can help in-form new practices and interventions that seek to improve the political news media ecosystem.…”