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Abstract

Several political and social factors (e.g.; social and geographic sorting, partisan gerrymandering) have contributed to a decrease in competitive congressional districts across the United States. We hypothesize and test whether candidates running in non-competitive partisan districts use more moral and emotional language in their campaign communication compared to candidates running in more competitive districts. We anchor our discussion in the concept of identity ownership, a concept that captures how political elites perform partisan prototypicality to appeal to increasingly homogeneous and ideologically extreme constituents. Using computational analysis to explore the content of over 17,000 tweets from 20 districts, this study investigates the moral and emotional content of candidate’s online campaign communications during the 2022 congressional midterm election campaign. Consistent with the hypotheses, moral and emotional language were more prevalent in less competitive congressional districts (compared to more competitive ones), and during primary races compared to the general election. Implications for democratic health are discussed.

Keywords

district competitiveness gerrymandering prototypicality moral and emotional language political communication

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