Mind the Gap? Negative Tweets & Partisanship in the House of Representatives

How does the lack of institutional legislative power and influence in the House of Representatives shape politicians’ rhetoric? In previous work, we found evidence that members of Congress in the minority and the party opposing the president were more negative in the language they used on Twitter. In this project, we dive deeper into their negative tweets and theorize under what conditions we expect representatives to be more likely to use them. We offer a plan of how to leverage almost 2 million unique tweets made by representatives 2013-2018 to assess the impact of a representative’s political power, or lack thereof, on her use of different methods of strategic negative sentiment in her tweets. Given the increasing contention between the two parties on- and offline, it is unlikely that the use of negative rhetoric and its potentially harmful impact on American government and congress will decrease in the near future.