You Lie! Patterns of Partisan Taunting in the U.S. Senate (Poster)

This is a poster that describes our analysis of “partisan taunting,” the explicit, public, and negative attacks on another political party or its members, usually using vitriolic and derogatory language. We first demonstrate that most projects that hand code text in the social sciences optimize with respect to the wrong criterion, resulting in large, unnecessary biases. We show how to fix this problem and then apply it to taunting. We find empirically that, unlike most claims in the press and the literature, taunting is not inexorably increasing; it appears instead to be a rational political strategy, most often used by those least likely to win by traditional means – ideological extremists, out-party members when the president is unpopular, and minority party members. However, although taunting appears to be individually rational, it is collectively irrational: Constituents may resonate with one cutting taunt by their Senator, but they might not approve if he or she were devoting large amounts of time to this behavior rather than say trying to solve important national problems. We hope to partially rectify this situation by posting public rankings of Senatorial taunting behavior.