“The Enemy Is Within”: Elite Affective Polarization in American Politics
Recent work has shown that affective polarization is rising and that it has significant consequences for mass political behavior. Still, little work has examined whether and how this construct applies to an increasingly rancorous elite-level politics. In this book dissertation, I explore the causes of elite affective polarization and the consequences of that affect for elite behavior. I draw on original surveys of state legislative candidates, local elected officials, and congressional staff as well as text data and and policy-making behavior. My work contributes to various areas of political science, including work on democratic representation, legislative gridlock and the process of lawmaking, and affective polarization and partisan identity.
"Across the Aisle: Affective Polarization and Bipartisanship in American Legislatures."
Philip Waggoner, Robert Y. Shapiro, Samuel Frederick, and Ming Gong.
The Journal of Social Computing.
How do people talk about COVID-19 online? To address this question, we offer an unsupervised framework that allows us to examine Twitter framings of the pandemic. Our approach employs a network-based exploration of social media data to identify, categorize, and understand communication patterns about the novel coronavirus on Twitter. The simplest structure that emerges from our analysis is the distinction between the internal/personal, external/global, and generic threat framings of the pandemic. This structure replicates in different Twitter samples and is validated using the variation of information measure, reflecting the significance and stability of our findings. Such an exploratory study is useful for understanding the contours of the natural, non-random structure in this online space. We contend that this understanding of structure is necessary to address a host of causal, supervised, and related questions downstream.
Working Papers
"The Changing Nature of Affective Polarization"
Samuel Frederick and Robert Y. Shapiro.
"Does Interaction with Out-Party Elites in a Classroom Setting Diminish
Negative Partisanship?"
Samuel Frederick, Michael Miller, and Donald Green.
"Kill(ed) Bills: How Agenda Control Affects Roll-Call Ideal Point Estimates"
Samuel Frederick and Diana Da In Lee
IMAP: A Tweet-Based Index of Messaging and Affective Polarization Among Partisan Elites"
Samuel Frederick.
Reducing Challenges for Challengers? Social Media and the Decline of the Incumbency Advantage"
Samuel Frederick, Gregory Wawro, and Ethan Cooper.