IN CASE anyone was in much doubt, a new working paper by Matthew Gentzkow of Stanford University, Jesse Shapiro of Brown University and Matt Taddy of Microsoft Research claims to show that partisanship among America’s lawmakers is higher today than at any point since Reconstruction after the civil war. The researchers came to this conclusion after analysing more than 135 years of speeches in the Congressional Record, including 529,980 unique phrases spoken 297m times. In 1990, the probability of correctly guessing a lawmaker’s party from a one-minute speech was 55%, only slightly better than flipping a coin. In the mid-1990s, however, Democratic and Republican language began to diverge, as politicians on the left adopted phrases like “undocumented workers” and “tax breaks for the wealthy” while those on the right spoke of “illegal aliens” and “tax reform”. By 2008, the probability of correctly identifying a Democrat or Republican had jumped to 83%.
What caused this linguistic split? Possibly, say the authors, the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 led by Newt Gingrich (whose pollster and...Continue reading
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