According to a new Harvard study, “Partisan taunting” accounts for more than a quarter of all the communication made by members of Congress. Harvard Professor Gary King, who headed up the research, called the discovery “jarring and surprising” in an interview with The Washington Post, reported on Wednesday. And although it’s no secret that legislators relish in playing the “blame game,” especially amidst an increasingly volatile partisan budget battle, the study quantifies just how large a role insult and castigation play on Capitol Hill today.
According to the Post, King, the Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, used computers to analyze and search out patterns in congressional communication. Gathering together 64,000 congressional press releases written between 2005-2007, King and two graduate students sorted the letters by their substance. When the data came back, three of the categories that emerged were predictable: credit taking, position taking, and advertising. These are the standard, widely understood ways of expression on Capitol Hill, according to political scientists. However, a number of the releases didn’t square with that understanding.
“They’re a different thing. To say that the only thing members of Congress do is advertising, credit-claiming or position-taking, that’s not right,” King said in the interview. “Because sometimes, they just stand up there and taunt the other side.”
King’s study gives several examples of this “taunt” in action, and with the present back and forth volley between Democrats and Republicans ala budget cuts, the sentiment hits home.
However, as David Mayhew, the Yale professor responsible for the theory of credit taking, position taking, and advertising tells the Post, this back and forth could potentially be healthy.
“For the public, it’s sort of like watching a tennis match. . . . I think it’s productive in that sense.”
King’s view seems less optimistic.
“The entire government may go bankrupt, I guess. This week, right?” He said in the Post interview.
“We probably want our representatives to be listening to each other rather than calling each other names.”
