Mediaboss Marketing

By Erin K. Jenne October 19 at 2:01 PM

The following is a guest post by political scientistErin K. Jenneof Central European University.

*****

The tea party movement has been called out for many things, not least of which is championing positions that would make Barry Goldwater blush. This begs the question: What separates the tea party from Republicans or from the conservative movement at large?

Analysts have conducted surveys of self-identified tea party members to ascertain whether they differ in any important ways from the American voting population at large (or from Republicans), concluding that they are overwhelmingly white, middle-aged to old, slightly more educated and slightly higher income than the median American voter. There are also indications that tea party members have somewhat more negative views of minorities than the median voter. For example, they are more likely on average to associate welfare programs with low-income minorities believing that government programs that the broad American middle class depends on (Medicare and Social Security) are legitimate but that those they believe minorities disproportionately use (food stamps and Medicaid) are not. These programs, they believe, should be cut because they foster a culture of dependency on the government.

The positions adopted by self-defined tea party candidates may resemble core conservative values, but, in fact, an analysis of the transcripts of Republican Party presidential primary debates in 2008 vs. 2012 suggest that presidential candidates appear to have moved further to the right in the era of the tea party movement.

Juraj Medzihorsky, Levente Littvay and I recently published a piece on the effect of the tea party on the Republican Party since the formers inception in 2009. Our article, Has the Tea Party Era Radicalized the Republican Party? Evidence from Text Analysis of the 2008 and 2012 Republican Primary Debates, was published in the October 2014 issue of PS: Political Science and Politics.

Using a text analytic technique, we examine the transcripts of statements made by every major presidential candidate in the 2008 and the 2012 pre-Iowa Caucus debates (the pre-Iowa debates were selected to identify the original ideological positions of the candidates, before election period jockeying). In our study, we extracted positions of each of the candidates for the two primary periods on a latent dimension (more on this shortly), which is given below.

Figure 1 shows that not only did Republican presidential candidates in the 2012 primary elections stake out positions further to the right than Republican presidential candidates in the 2008 elections, but that those who ran in both elections (Ron Paul and Mitt Romney) adopted positions further to the right in 2012 than they did in 2008! This strongly suggests that the party has moved further to the right, most likelyin response to the rhetoric and political activism on the right embodied by the tea party movement.

Candidate positions. Figure: Medzihorsky, Littvay and Jenne, 2014

See original here:
Monkey Cage: The tea partys anti-Washington consensus