Incivility in Congressional Tweets

• Author: Andrew Ballard,Ryan DeTamble,Spencer Dorsey,Michael Heseltine,Marcus Johnson
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X221109516
• Published date: 01 November 2022
• Date: 01 November 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

American Politics Research

2022, Vol. 50(6) 769–780

© The Author(s) 2022

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/1532673X221109516

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Incivility in Congressional Tweets

Andrew Ballard

1

, Ryan DeTamble

1

, Spencer Dorsey

2

,

Michael Heseltine

3

, and Marcus Johnson

1

Abstract

Civility in political discourse is often thought to be necessary for deliberation and a healthy democracy. However, incivility is on

the rise in political discourse in the United States—even from members of Congress—suggesting that political incivility may in

fact be a tool to be used strategically. When and why, then, do members of Congress use incivility in their rhetoric? We develop

and test expectations for the usage of political incivility by members of Congress on Twitter, using every tweet sent by a

member of Congress from 2009–2020 coded for the presence of uncivil rhetoric via a novel application of transformer models

for natural language processing. We f‌ind that more ideologically extreme members, those in safer electoral situations, and those

who are in a position of political opposition are more likely to use incivility in their tweets, and that uncivil tweets increase

engagement with members’messages.

Keywords

political communication, congress, social media

Civility in political discourse is often thought to be necessary

for deliberation and a healthy democracy (e.g., Burger, 1975),

and research has found that political incivility can reduce both

trust in government and respect for opposing viewpoints

(Mutz, 2016), as well as act as a means to suppress criticisms

of injustices (Jamieson et al., 2017;Vrooman, 2002). Further,

two-thirds of Americans believe that incivility is a major

problem in today’s society (Civility in America, 2019). Calls

for decorum and civility in politics from political elites are

thus commonplace, such as the many pledges of civility made

by members of Congress following the shooting of House

Majority Whip Steve Scalise at a practice for the annual

congressional baseball game in 2017.

1

This coincided with a

“Summer of Civility”initiative launched by the Bipartisan

Policy Center.

2

Yet incivility in political messaging is on the rise, often

from members of Congress (see Figure 1), implying that

members have incentives to send uncivil messages in certain

situations. Consider an exchange between Sen. John Cornyn

(R-TX) and his challenger MJ Hegar in August 2020: in

response to a tweet where Hegar characterized their race as

one between an “ass-kicker and a boot-licker”, Cornyn

tweeted “Classy.”

3

Rather than say Cornyn or Hegar acted out

of some adherence to or disdain for democratic deliberation,

we instead argue Hegar employed political incivility and

Cornyn called out Hegar’s use of political incivility because

each thought it was advantageous to do so. Indeed, both the

use of political incivility and calls for decorum may be

strategic.

Scholars have recently devoted substantial attention to

researching the dynamics of incivility (e.g., Mutz, 2016;

Sydnor, 2019), even on Twitter (e.g., Theocharis et al., 2020),

but we have reason to believe that the incentives for elected

off‌icials are different from those of citizens (Zeitzoff, 2020),

and our understanding of uncivil communications from

legislators is lacking. We develop expectations about which

members should be more likely to use political incivility, and

when, based on strategic service of their goals. We argue that

the primary benef‌it to employing uncivil rhetoric is increased

attention and engagement with members’messages, partic-

ularly among core supporters. There are certainly risks to

uncivil rhetoric, such as lower candidate evaluations and trust

in government. But certain members, for example those not in

the president’s party, those in the minority party in their

chamber, those in safer electoral situations, and ideological

extremists, have incentive to use incivility in their messages

because the potential benef‌its outweigh the costs.

While arguments that uncivil messages—and negative

messages more broadly—increase engagement and are more

1

American University, Washington, DC, USA

2

Unaff‌iliated Researcher

3

Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

Corresponding Author:

Andrew Ballard, Government, American University, 4400 Massachusetts

Ave NW, Washington, DC 20016-8007, USA.

Email: aballard@american.edu