Has the tea party era radicalized the Republican party? Evidence from text analysis of the 2008 and 2012 Republican primary debates

Juraj Medzihorsky*, Levente Littvay, Erin K. Jenne

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)806-812
Number of pages7
JournalPS: Political Science & Politics
Volume47
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - 6 Oct 2014

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