Signaling Identity: How Race and Gender Shape What Representatives Say Online

Abstract

The rise of social media in the realm of political communication has profoundly transformed both the media landscape and the strategies employed by elected officials to cultivate their public image and connect with constituents. Platforms like Twitter have expanded the reach of political messaging, providing opportunities for emerging voices to bring about change. With the potential to go viral with a single tweet or post, Twitter incentivizes elected officials to craft engaging rhetoric, often leaning towards negativity. This is particularly evident during political campaigns and increasingly during periods of governance.

Despite our understanding of how politicians use digital platforms strategically, an important question remains: who has the freedom to employ negative rhetoric, and who is limited? While all candidates share the desire for reelection, current research tends to overlook the diverse experiences shaped by candidates' social identities. Instead, explanations tend to attribute rhetorical strategies to institutional dynamics, assuming a universal experience among political figures.

Challenging this prevailing notion, I argue that candidates' strategies and rhetorical decisions, both during campaigns and while in office, are shaped by a complex process that can be best understood through an intersectional lens. Previous studies on gender or race in political communication have yielded inconclusive results. To address this gap, I propose a theoretical framework that incorporates insights from race, ethnic politics, and sociology. This framework recognizes the unique experiences tied to a candidate's racial and gender identities and examines how their interplay reflects their relative position within the U.S. hierarchy of privilege. Drawing on social dominance theory, my model proposes a hierarchy of privilege that influences the rhetorical latitude of political actors based on audience expectations and biases rooted in their race/gender intersectional identity (RGID). A lower position in this hierarchy corresponds to heightened rhetorical constraints, limiting what a political figure can safely articulate without facing backlash.

Using a comprehensive database of tweets from House legislators spanning the 113th to 116th Congresses, as well as tweets from 2020 election candidates, I conduct sentiment analysis through multivariate regression models. This analysis aims to identify patterns of sentiment, both negative and positive, in relation to the intersecting racial and gender identities of political actors. This research addresses questions about the prevalence of negative rhetoric across demographics, the nuances of emotional communication across different race and gender intersections, and the role of party affiliation in shaping these dynamics.

From the fourth to the sixth chapters of this dissertation, I provide empirical evidence supporting the significant impact of a political actor’s intersecting racial and gender identities moderate emotive rhetoric in public discourse, effectively answering the question that yes, political actors from minoritized RGIDs communicate in ways that are distinct from white male counterparts who represent the dominant group in the United States. Importantly, these social identity driven effects persisted when political party was held constant, across varying electoral contexts, and amongst incumbent candidates and challenger candidates.

This dissertation uncovers the complex layers of rhetorical constraints tied to the intersectional backgrounds of U.S. political figures, both within and outside of Congress. The insights from this study emphasize the significant influence of intersectional identities on congressional communication and the differential freedom afforded to political elites in expressing their emotions. This research serves as a foundation for further exploration of how intersectional identities shape the behavior of political elites in the U.S. political landscape.