TY - JOUR
T1 - Has the tea party era radicalized the Republican party? Evidence from text analysis of the 2008 and 2012 Republican primary debates
AU - Medzihorsky, Juraj
AU - Littvay, Levente
AU - Jenne, Erin K.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© American Political Science Association, 2014.
PY - 2014/10/6
Y1 - 2014/10/6
N2 - Much ink has been spilled to describe the emergence and likely infl uence of the Tea Party on the American political landscape. Pundits and journalists declared that the emergence of the Tea Party movement pushed the Republican Party to a more extreme ideological position, which is generally anti-Washington. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed the ideological positions taken by candidates in the 2008 and 2012 pre-Iowa caucus Republican presidentialprimary debates. To establish the positions, we used the debate transcripts and a text-analytic technique that placed the candidates on a single dimension. Findings show that, overall, the 2012 candidates moved closer to an anti-Washington ideology - associated with the Tea Party movement - and away from the more traditional social conservative Republican ideology, which was more salient in the 2008 debates. Both Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, the two candidates who ran in both elections, shifted signifi cantly in the ideological direction associated with the Tea Party.
AB - Much ink has been spilled to describe the emergence and likely infl uence of the Tea Party on the American political landscape. Pundits and journalists declared that the emergence of the Tea Party movement pushed the Republican Party to a more extreme ideological position, which is generally anti-Washington. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed the ideological positions taken by candidates in the 2008 and 2012 pre-Iowa caucus Republican presidentialprimary debates. To establish the positions, we used the debate transcripts and a text-analytic technique that placed the candidates on a single dimension. Findings show that, overall, the 2012 candidates moved closer to an anti-Washington ideology - associated with the Tea Party movement - and away from the more traditional social conservative Republican ideology, which was more salient in the 2008 debates. Both Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, the two candidates who ran in both elections, shifted signifi cantly in the ideological direction associated with the Tea Party.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84915788310&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1017/S1049096514001085
DO - 10.1017/S1049096514001085
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84915788310
SN - 1049-0965
VL - 47
SP - 806
EP - 812
JO - PS: Political Science & Politics
JF - PS: Political Science & Politics
IS - 4
ER -