College Honors Program

The Progression of Affective Polarization on Twitter: Case Studies in U.S. Presidential Politics

Date of Creation

5-31-2023

Document Type

Campus Access Only

First Advisor

Nina Barzachka

Abstract

Twitter has become an increasingly prevalent part of political discourse in the United States, particularly since the presidency of Donald Trump. Another current feature of American politics is hyper-partisanship, which has produced increased levels of affective political polarization. Affective polarization is an especially corrosive type of political polarization, one in which the main unifying factor of a political group or party is a disdain for the opposing group. In order to determine whether or not affective polarization has increased on social media in the past 10 years, I analyzed Twitter responses to a series of significant political events: a lobbying effort from President Obama and Sandy Hook families in 2013, Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment during the 2016 presidential campaign, President Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” comment in reference to the 2017 Charlottesville riots, Trump’s pressuring of the Georgia secretary of state to “find” him votes following the 2020 election, and President Biden’s remarks at Independence Hall in 2022. To assess the degree of polarization for each event and to evaluate the overall trend, a novel method for analyzing the linguistics and sentiments behind sample sets of tweets was implemented and the results were cataloged and compared. Following this comparison, I determined that affective polarization had increased on Twitter across the five events.

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