US Legislators are Rhetorically Responsive to Electoral Demands on Social Media

• In Event: Quantitative Study of Elite Communications

Abstract

A growing body of work aims to measure political elites’ use of populist rhetoric in both traditional and digital media. This paper adds to this literature by attempting to identify the effect of elections on U.S. legislators' use of populist rhetoric on Twitter. Using a large language model-based approach, I first build and validate a multi-part measure of populism. Then, using a regression discontinuity-in-time design, I find a meaningful relationship between elections and populist rhetoric. Across three election cycles, I observe an increase in populist rhetoric as election day approaches and a large drop in populist rhetoric immediately after legislators face election. This paper contributes simultaneously to two bodies of literature: that on legislative responsiveness and that on populism. In doing so, I find that legislators are responsive to constituency-based demand for populist rhetoric and that, although legislators of all ideological stripes increase their use of populist rhetoric in the lead-up to elections, the largest post-election drop-offs occur only among moderate members.

Author

• Andrew Elias Strasberg, Washington University in St. Louis