Partisan Conflict and Congressional Outreach

Hostility in political discourse was thrown into sharp relief in 2016 by a contentious presidential campaign. A new Pew Research Center analysis of more than 200,000 press releases and Facebook posts from the official accounts of members of the 114th Congress uses methods from the emerging field of computational social science to quantify how often legislators themselves “go negative” in their outreach to the public.

Overall, the study finds that the most aggressive forms of disagreement are relatively rare in these channels. For the average member, 10% of press releases and 9% of Facebook posts expressed disagreement with the other party in a way that conveyed anger, resentment or annoyance. But there are distinct patterns among those who voiced political discord: congressional leaders, those with more partisan voting records and those who are elected in districts that are solidly Republican or Democratic were the most likely to go negative. Republicans, who did not control the presidency during the 114th Congress, were much more likely to voice disagreement than were Democrats.


Partisan Conflict and Congressional Outreach Republican lawmakers ‘go negative’ more often than Democrats, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis (Washington Post)