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Republican U.S. lawmakers are significantly more likely than their Democratic colleagues to "go negative" and attack their political opponents in official statements, according to a first-of-its kind Pew Research Center analysis of congressional press releases and Facebook posts. But whether that negativity is a reflection of a Democratic president during the 16-month analysis period beginning in January 2015, or of a more fundamental difference between Republican and Democratic messaging strategies remains unclear.
What's more, voters on either side of the aisle seem to like it when their lawmakers attack the other side. The Pew analysis found that on Facebook, "posts that contained 'indignant disagreement' - defined here as a statement of opposition that conveys annoyance, resentment or anger - averaged 206 more likes, 66 more shares and 54 more comments than those that contained no disagreement at all."
Pew arrived at these numbers by collecting "all official press releases and Facebook posts identifiable via internet and archival sources, issued by members of the 114th Congress between Jan. 1, 2015, and April 30, 2016, prior to either party's 2016 presidential nominating convention." The dataset amounted to more than 94,000 press releases and more than 108,000 Facebook posts.
A team of human "content coders" manually analyzed a subset of 7,000 of the statements to assess whether they expressed disagreement with or opposition to either Democrats or Republicans, or to President Barack Obama. Crucially, the coders only measured disagreement aimed at human political actors - the parties or individual members thereof. Abstract policy statements were not included in the analysis.
"Thus, criticism of the Affordable Care Act (ACA or 'Obamacare') is not classified as disagreement unless it explicitly blames President Obama or his administration for some negative outcome or associates the policy directly with political opponents," the authors write.
This allows the report to capture "disagreements that are explicitly partisan," rather than policy-based, said Solomon Messing, Director of Data Labs at the Pew Research Center and a lead author on the report: "There's this kind of partisan dimension that may be independent from policy that we wanted to shed some light on here."
While criticizing the political discourse as "too negative" has become a common practice among voters and politicians alike, the Pew study found that politicians who go on the attack on social media are rewarded with more likes, comments and shares than politicians who stick with bipartisan messages.
Among lawmakers of both parties, for instance, the typical Facebook post with a bipartisan message was liked 166 times, shared 30 times, and commented on 28 times. By contrast, the typical post expressing indignant disagreement with the other side received 468 likes, 111 shares and 78 comments.
Messing cautions that people who follow politicians on Facebook are not a nationally representative sample of voters, so these numbers don't necessarily generalize out to the entire public. Still, the gap between what voters say they want in opinion polls and what people appear to reward on social media is striking.
The report also found that Republicans were much more likely to express partisan disagreement in Facebook posts (22 percent) and press releases (28 percent) than their Democratic colleagues (6 percent and 10 percent, respectively).
What's more, Republican lawmakers were much more likely to be indignant in their disagreement, employing harsh rhetoric to criticize their opponents. Republicans expressed indignant disagreement in 13 percent of Facebook posts and 15 percent of their press releases, compared to only 3 percent and 4 percent, respectively, for Democrats.
But much of this difference may have been a factor of who was in the White House at the time of the study: Barack Obama, who as a Democratic president provided a single point of focus for Republican criticism. While Democrats criticized Republican lawmakers, "for the most part the focus of Republican ire was President Obama," the report found.
"In this asymmetrical relationship - with congressional Republicans facing off against a Democratic president - Republican legislators came off as more likely to be negative in their press releases and social media posts," according to the report.
It's possible that in the current environment - with an unpopular Republican occupying the White House - Democratic lawmakers may be inspired to go on the offensive more often than their Republican colleagues. It may also be the case that Republicans prioritize negative messaging more than Democrats, and that in the absence of a Democratic president, GOP lawmakers will simply shift their ire toward their colleagues across the aisle.
We won't know for sure until Pew conducts the analysis again for the current Congress. "We're interested in continuing to collect and expand the data," Pew's Messing said.
Messing also cautions that, just like with survey research, there's a certain amount of error involved with collecting and quantifying lawmakers' public statements. There may be shades of meaning and nuance that are overlooked by human or machine coders, for instance. "There's a degree of error with everything presented in the report," Messing said. The report concludes an in-depth methodology section that quantifies that error where possible.