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Has the Tea Party Era Radicalized the Republican Party? Evidence from Text Analysis of the 2008 and 2012 Republican Primary Debates

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2014

Juraj Medzihorsky ,
Levente Littvay  and
Erin K. Jenne
Juraj Medzihorsky
Affiliation:
Central European University
Levente Littvay
Affiliation:
Central European University
Erin K. Jenne
Affiliation:
Central European University
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Abstract

Much ink has been spilled to describe the emergence and likely influence 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 presidential-primary 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 significantly in the ideological direction associated with the Tea Party.

Type
Features
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 47 , Issue 4 , October 2014 , pp. 806 - 812
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2014 

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