Abstract
This chapter contributes to research on the strategic use of emotions in political campaigns by gauging the presence of negative rhetoric in the social media posts of congressional candidates. Leveraging a dataset of tweets posted by candidates for the U.S. House during the last two months of the 2018 midterm election, we utilize a dictionary-based automated text analysis program to estimate the amount of negative language used by the candidates. Our results demonstrate that the campaign context can affect the likelihood that candidates use negative rhetoric in their tweets, as does gender and partisanship. Challengers, those in competitive races, losers, women, and Democrats were more likely to use anxious, sad, and angry words in their tweets during the run-up to Election Day 2018.
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Notes
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Systematically collecting and coding non-textual elements of social media is mass quantity also poses a challenge for those studying political elites’ social media behavior.
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Gervais and Morris, 135.
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- 39.
Specifically, we collected tweets posted from September 6 through November 5.
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- 41.
One notable caveat is that the dictionary method we employ for text analysis can miss context—thus, at times, use of negative rhetoric is not reflective of genuine emotion, or even attempts to feign genuine emotion.
- 42.
We used ratings issued on September 7, 2018: https://www.cookpolitical.com/ratings/house-race-ratings/185302
- 43.
All of Pennsylvania’s districts were redrawn in early 2018 following a ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
- 44.
These rates were calculated by taking the total amount of emotional words included in the tweets and dividing this by the total amount of words tweeted during the two-month study period. Members who issued less than ten tweets during the two months were not considered.
- 45.
Gluck , who issued only 13 tweets during the study period, declared “shame, SHAME!” and asked what the editors of the Washington Post had to “fear” in a pair of tweets, ostensibly decrying the Post’s failure to mention his candidacy in an article endorsing another candidate. “Shame” and “fear” are examples of anxious words.
- 46.
In reply to a journalist who quoted Teachout criticizing Maloney, Maloney tweeted, “Gee, I’m hurt u guys missed my 30 town halls in 30 days. But then @ZephyrTeachout was super busy “respecting voters” with those lies she told about opposing gun safety laws in 2016.” In another tweet to the journalist, which contained a gif of a man putting on a tin hat, Maloney wrote, “Hey buddy, don’t sell @ZephyrTeachout short. She loses all the time with no help from me…” The terms “hurt,” “missed,” and “loses” qualify as sad words.
- 47.
One might question whether Democrats’ use of negativity on Twitter was an explicit, thought-out strategy. Perhaps it was not, but we do think it largely results from the same political instinct that would lead Democratic candidates to issue attack advertisements on television, through the mail, and so on. We would also expect that campaign aides influenced the tone of social media messaging strategies in many cases, although this claim deserves empirical analysis.
- 48.
Excepting memes and gifs, which we do not incorporate into our analyses.
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Gervais, B.T., Evans, H.K., Russell, A. (2020). Fear and Loathing on Twitter: Exploring Negative Rhetoric in Tweets During the 2018 Midterm Election. In: Foreman, S., Godwin, M., Wilson, W. (eds) The Roads to Congress 2018. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19819-0_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19819-0_3
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