Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T17:18:59.834Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Has the Tea Party Era Radicalized the Republican Party? Evidence from Text Analysis of the 2008 and 2012 Republican Primary Debates

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2014

Juraj Medzihorsky ,
Levente Littvay  and
Erin K. Jenne
Juraj Medzihorsky
Affiliation:
Central European University
Levente Littvay
Affiliation:
Central European University
Erin K. Jenne
Affiliation:
Central European University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Much ink has been spilled to describe the emergence and likely influence of the Tea Party on the American political landscape. Pundits and journalists declared that the emergence of the Tea Party movement pushed the Republican Party to a more extreme ideological position, which is generally anti-Washington. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed the ideological positions taken by candidates in the 2008 and 2012 pre-Iowa caucus Republican presidential-primary debates. To establish the positions, we used the debate transcripts and a text-analytic technique that placed the candidates on a single dimension. Findings show that, overall, the 2012 candidates moved closer to an anti-Washington ideology—associated with the Tea Party movement—and away from the more traditional social conservative Republican ideology, which was more salient in the 2008 debates. Both Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, the two candidates who ran in both elections, shifted significantly in the ideological direction associated with the Tea Party.

Type
Features
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 47 , Issue 4 , October 2014 , pp. 806 - 812
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Abramowitz, Alan I. 2011. “Partisan Polarization and the Rise of the Tea Party Movement.” 2011 APSA Annual Meeting Paper.Google Scholar
Arceneaux, Kevin, and Nicholson, Stephen P.. 2012. “Who Wants to Have a Tea Party? The Who, What, and Why of the Tea Party Movement.” PS: Political Science and Politics 45(4): 700–10.Google Scholar
Barreto, M., Cooper, B., Gonzalez, B., Parker, C., and Towler, C.. 2011. “The Tea Party in the Age of Obama: Mainstream Conservatism or Out-Group Anxiety?” Political Power and Social Theory 22: 105–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ceron, Andrea. 2012. “Bounded Oligarchy: How and When Factions Constrain Leaders in Party Position-Taking.” Electoral Studies 31(4): 689–701.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ceron, Andrea. 2014. “Gamson Rule Not for All: Patterns of Portfolio Allocation among Italian Party Factions.” European Journal of Political Research 53(1): 180–99.Google Scholar
Feinerer, Ingo. 2013. “tm: Text Mining Package.” R Package Version 0.5–8.3.Google Scholar
Gervais, Bryan T., and Morris, Irwin L.. 2012. “Reading the Tea Leaves: Understanding Tea Party Caucus Membership in the US House of Representatives.” PS: Political Science and Politics 45(2): 245–50.Google Scholar
Grimmer, Justin, and Stewart, Brandon M.. 2013. “Text as Data: The Promise and Pitfalls of Automatic Content Analysis Methods for Political Texts.” Political Analysis 21(3): 267–97.Google Scholar
Jacobson, Gary C. 2011. “The President, the Tea Party, and Voting Behavior in 2010: Insights from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study.” Available at Social Science Research Network 1907251.Google Scholar
Karpowitz, C., Monson, J., Patterson, K., and Pope, J.. 2011. “Tea Time in America? The Impact of the Tea Party Movement on the 2010 Midterm Elections.” PS: Political Science & Politics 44(2): 303–9.Google Scholar
Klüver, Heike. 2009. “Measuring Interest Group Influence Using Quantitative Text Analysis.” European Union Politics 10(4): 535–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Klüver, Heike. 2011. “The Contextual Nature of Lobbying: Explaining Lobbying Success in the European Union.” European Union Politics 12(4): 483–506.Google Scholar
Klüver, Heike. 2012. “Biasing Politics? Interest Group Participation in EU Policy-Making.” West European Politics 35(5): 1114–33.Google Scholar
Libby, Ronald T. 2013. Purging the Republican Party: Tea Party Campaigns and Elections. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.Google Scholar
Livne, A., Simmons, M. P., Adar, E., and Adamic, L. A.. 2011. “The Party Is over Here: Structure and Content in the 2010 Election.” Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2011.Google Scholar
Louwerse, Tom. 2012. “Mechanisms of Issue Congruence: The Democratic Party Mandate.” West European Politics 35(6): 1249–71.Google Scholar
Lowe, Will. 2013. “Austin: Do Things with Words.” R Package Version 0.2.Google Scholar
Mead, , Russell, Walter. 2011. “Tea Party and American Foreign Policy.” Foreign Affairs 90(2): 28–44.Google Scholar
Meyer, David, Hornik, Kurt, and Feinerer, Ingo. 2008. “Text Mining Infrastructure in R.” Journal of Statistical Software 25(5): 1–54.Google Scholar
Proksch, Sven-Oliver, and Slapin, Jonathan B.. 2009. “How to Avoid Pitfalls in Statistical Analysis of Political Texts: The Case of Germany.” German Politics 18(3): 323–44.Google Scholar
Proksch, Sven-Oliver. 2010. “Position Taking in European Parliament Speeches.” British Journal of Political Science 40(3): 587–611.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sven-Oliver, Proksch, Slapin, Jonathan B., and Thies, Michael. 2011. “Party System Dynamics in Post-War Japan: A Quantitative Content Analysis of Electoral Pledges.” Electoral Studies 30(1): 114–24.Google Scholar
R Core Team. 2013. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.Google Scholar
Slapin, Jonathan B., and Proksch, Sven-Oliver. 2008. “A Scaling Model for Estimating Time-Series Party Positions from Texts.” American Journal of Political Science 52(3): 705–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williamson, Vanessa, Skocpol, Theda, and Coggin, John. 2011. “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.” Perspectives on Politics 9(1): 25–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zernike, Kate. 2010. Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America. New York: Times Books/Henry Holt & Co.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Medzihorsky supplementary material

Supplementary table 6

Download Medzihorsky supplementary material(File)
File 14.2 KB
Supplementary material: File

Medzihorsky supplementary material

Supplementary table 5

Download Medzihorsky supplementary material(File)
File 15 KB
Supplementary material: File

Medzihorsky supplementary material

Supplementary data

Download Medzihorsky supplementary material(File)
File 16.2 KB