Tweeting racial representation how the congressional Black Caucus used Twitter in the 113th congress PDF

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Politics, Groups, and Identities

ISSN: 2156-5503 (Print) 2156-5511 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpgi20

Tweeting racial representation: how the congressional Black Caucus used Twitter in the 113th congress Alvin B. Tillery To cite this article: Alvin B. Tillery (2019): Tweeting racial representation: how the congressional Black Caucus used Twitter in the 113th congress, Politics, Groups, and Identities, DOI: 10.1080/21565503.2019.1629308 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2019.1629308

Published online: 18 Jun 2019.

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POLITICS, GROUPS, AND IDENTITIES https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2019.1629308

Tweeting racial representation: how the congressional Black Caucus used Twitter in the 113th congress Alvin B. Tillerya,b a Department of Political Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA; b Department of African American Studies, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

ABSTRACT

ARTICLE HISTORY

The social media and microblogging site Twitter has emerged as both a vehicle for political expression and a powerful tool for political organizing within the African American community. This paper examines the extent to which members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) utilize Twitter to communicate with their constituents about racial issues. An analysis of CBC members’ tweets during the 113th Congress (2013–2014) shows that the organization’s members do talk about race and occasionally use racially distinct hashtags. Moreover, statistical analyses show that the best predictors of a CBC members’ engagement with racial issues on Twitter are being a woman legislator, the size of their margin of victory in the 2012 elections, and the percentage of whites living within the boundaries of their district.

Received 1 May 2018 Accepted 1 April 2019 KEYWORDS

Black politics; Black Twitter; Congressional Black Caucus; Black representation; Black women legislators; Twitter

Introduction The rise of social media in the last two decades has transformed human social interactions in a number of ways (Couldry 2012; Lovejoy and Saxton 2012; O’Keeffe and ClarkePearson 2011; Van Dijck 2013). In the political arena, social media platforms like FaceBook and Twitter have become important resources for organizing protest activities (Della Porta and Mosca 2005; Eltantawy and Wiest 2011 Langman 2005). These tools have also emerged as important means for politicians in advanced democracies to directly communicate with the public during their campaigns for office and as they carry out their representative duties once elected (Conway, Kenski, and Wang 2013; Druckman, Kifer, and Parkin 2007; Graham, Jackson, and Broersma 2014; Grant, Moon, and Grant 2010; Towner and Dulio 2012). This paper examines how members of the Congressional Black Caucus used Twitter to communicate their ideas about racial issues during the 113th Congress (2013–2014). Twitter is a popular social networking and microblogging website. The service allows registered users to send text messages of 140 characters or less or share photos and videos. The process of posting messages or visual media to the service is called “tweeting” in the parlance of the social network. Twitter also allows registered users to follow the CONTACT Alvin B. Tillery

[email protected]

© 2019 Western Political Science Association

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accounts of other users in the network for the purpose of reading their public “tweets” and or engaging in direct communications. During the first quarter of 2017, the site reported that it averaged 328 million users per month. Given Twitter’s reach, it is not surprising that members of Congress have embraced the website as a means of direct communication with their constituents (Golbeck, Grimes, and Rogers 2010; Peterson 2012; Shogan 2010). The scholarly consensus on the Twitter usage by members of Congress is that they primarily turn to the service to engage in forms of communication aimed at bolstering their prospects for reelection (Druckman, Kifer, and Parkin 2010; Golbeck, Grimes, and Rogers 2010; Peterson 2012). In other words, the social network is utilized for both the “position-taking” statements that Mayhew (1974) describes as essential for all members of Congress hoping to win reelection and for engaging in the empathetic rhetoric that Fenno (1978) claims is a key component of developing what he calls a “home style.” For Fenno, developing and maintaining a “home style” – which encompasses self-presentation, delivery of resources, and explanations of one’s work in Washington, DC – that fits with one’s district was the primary task of a member of Congress. Scholars have long-noted how important it is for African American members of Congress to engage in position-taking on racial issues and deploy empathetic speech about race relations in order to develop and maintain robust “home style” connections with their constituents (Fenno 2003; Sinclair-Chapman 2002; Singh 1998; Smith 1981; Tate 2001; Tate 2003; Tillery 2006). The main questions asked in this paper are: Do African American members of Congress use Twitter to take positions on racial issues? Do they use racially distinct hashtags to communicate with the African American community? Finally, is Twitter usage to engage racial issues uniform across the membership of the Congressional Black Caucus or do some African American legislators use it more than others for these purposes? Why study the tweets of CBC members? There are three answers to this question. First, Twitter is heavily utilized within the African American community (Smith 2014). Indeed, African Americans are 25% of the population of the American Twittersphere despite the fact that they are only 13.5% of the population of the United States (Brock 2012). Moreover, several recent studies have shown that African Americans access the service on a daily basis at a much higher rate than their white counterparts (Fox, Zickuhr, and Smith 2009; Horrigan 2009; Smith 2010; Smith and Brenner 2012). In short, Twitter is the space where the digital divide between African Americans and whites evaporates. It is important to understand the extent to which African American members of Congress are aware of this reality and seek to capitalize on it to expand their opportunities to communicate with their constituents. Ardoin (2013) has argued, based on his analysis of the volume of tweets generated by Congressional Black Caucus members between 2006 and February 20, 2012, that there is a significant “digital divide” between African American and white legislators in terms of both their utilization of Twitter and their impact on the social media site. Dancey’s and Masand’s (2017) study of the ways that African American and white members of Congress responded to the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner on Twitter in the summer of 2014 found that African American members were actually more communicative than their white counterparts during these events. This study has the potential to adjudicate between these competing findings by tracking how CBC members utilize Twitter over the entire run of the 113th Congress.

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The second reason to study the behavior of Congressional Black Caucus members on Twitter is the fact that – as both Ardoin (2013) and Dancey and Masand (2017) agree – it is a space where African Americans are deeply engaged in a truly national conversation about both the meaning of race and race relations (Carney 2016; Nakamura 2008). Several studies have demonstrated that African American discourse on Twitter tends to replicate the unique idioms and verbal patterns – known in both common parlance and academic studies as “signifyin” (Gates 1983; Mitchell-Kernan and Caponi 1999) – that have long circulated in the community’s oral traditions (Brock 2012; Florini 2014; Manjoo 2010). Some of these same studies also assert that, just as with their face-toface speech acts, signifyin’ on Black Twitter is often a form of resistance to racism and racial exclusions (Brock 2012; Florini 2014). Recent studies have also elaborated how the use of hashtags that make reference to racial issues – so called “Blacktags” – can quickly transform Black Twitter into a counterpublic sphere where African Americans can join debates about the important issues affecting their racial group in real time (Carney 2016; Sharma 2013). As stated above, Dancey’s and Masand’s (2017) study of the period between August 9th and August 25th of 2014 has provided compelling evidence that CBC members do seek to participate in these national conversations about race. The aim of this study is to determine how much CBC members seek to drive these conversations on Black. Finally, studying the tweets of Congressional Black Caucus members also provides us with an opportunity to further develop predictive models of racial representation in the US Congress. The Congressional Black Caucus was founded in 1971. Studies of the organization in this period have shown that the thirteen African Americans serving in the House of Representatives a that time had a set of experiences in the Civil Rights Movement that gave them very similar ideas about how to achieve racial progress (Barnett 1975; Barnett 1982; Henry 1977; Singh 1998). In this context, it was not very difficult for individual CBC members to achieve what Representative William Clay, one of the founders of the organization, called in his memoir a “solidarity of purpose and program” to advance the racial group interests of African Americans (Clay 1993, 117). A number of studies have revealed how both the growth and diversification of the CBC’s ranks in terms of age, experience, and representational context over the past four decades have generated cross-pressures that make it more challenging for the larger group to hang together on racial issues of national import (Canon 1999; Singh 1998; Tate 2003; Tate 2014; Tillery 2011, 125–149; Whitby 2007). The statistical analyses presented in this paper will allow us to ascertain whether these same trends hold in the Twittersphere as well or if other patterns of cleavage emerge. To answer these questions, I present a systematic analysis of the tweets of the 41 members of the Congressional Black Caucus who served in the House of Representatives during the 113th Congress. The 113th Congress provides an excellent window to explore the ways that CBC members use Twitter for several reasons. First, at the time that its members were sworn in, the 113th Congress was the most diverse in the history of the republic (Hicks 2013). Moreover, for the first time in U.S. history, women and minorities comprised the majority of the Democratic Party’s caucus in the House of Representatives. Second, the 113th Congress was the first seated after Barack Obama won reelection to a second term as president of the United States of America. Finally, the rise of the #BlackLivesMatter movement at the start of the 113th Congress placed a national spotlight on

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how the issues of hate crimes, police brutality, and state violence affected the African American community (Garza 2014; Rickford 2016; Taylor 2016) If CBC members use Twitter in the same strategic ways that they now pursue legislative activities, we can expect these dynamics to generate incentives for individual African American legislators to talk about race on Twitter. The article proceeds as follows. The next section places this study within the theoretical context of the extant literature on African American representation and articulates the hypotheses that will be evaluated through quantitative analyses. The paper then shifts to a description of the data and methods. From there, the paper presents both the summary statistics about CBC members’ Twitter usage and statistical models of the factors that predict the behavior of African American members of Congress in the Twittersphere. The concluding section describes the relevance of the main findings for ongoing debates about the nature of African American representation and the internal dynamics of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Theoretical context and hypotheses The Congressional Black Caucus was formed in 1971 (Barnett 1975; Bositis 1994; Singh 1998). The organization was predicated upon the 260% increase in the ranks of African American legislators serving in the House of Representatives between the passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965 and the 1970 elections. From its inception, the formation of the CBC garnered considerable attention from scholars seeking to understand the relationship between African American legislators and their constituents. Indeed, the formation of the Congressional Black Caucus ushered in the rise of the modern tradition of legislative studies within the fields of African American politics and racial and ethnic politics (REP). There have been three waves of scholarship on how membership in the Congressional Black Caucus shapes both the legislative behavior of African American members of Congress and the representation that they provide to their constituents. Although most of this literature has elided the formal study of the rhetoric of African American legislators in favor of foci on bill sponsorship and roll-call votes, the four hypotheses tested in this paper are derived from key insights developed in these three waves of scholarship. The first wave of academic studies of the Congressional Black Caucus were largely qualitative case-studies that focused on the group’s decision to organize along racial lines and how this form of organization shaped African American legislators’ legislative behavior (Barker and McCorry 1976; Barnett 1975; Henry 1977).1 These studies were the first to chronicle the fact that the founders of the CBC saw their organization’s role as an explicitly racial one – providing representation to both a national African American constituency and their home districts (Barnett 1975; Henry 1977). These same studies also highlighted the concerns that some African American legislators raised in this early period – what Barnett (1975, 1977) calls the “collective stage” of the CBC’s development – about their ability to balance between their desires to provide “symbolic leadership” to all African Americans and to deliver “tangible benefits” to their districts (Henry 1977, 150–152). Barnett’s (1975, 1977) landmark studies of the internal dynamics of the Congressional Black Caucus during the 93rd and 94th Congresses traced the growing realization among

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the charter group of CBC members that striking the right balance would require them to pare down their extra-institutional activities aimed at providing symbolic representation th and focus more on passing legislation. Thus, Barnett reports that at the start of the 94 Congress, the CBC entered an “ethnic stage” of development in which African American legislators began to behave as if there was a “parallel between the political assimilation of blacks and the political assimilation of white ethnic groups” (Barnett 1975, 40). In other words, CBC members began to adopt the attitude that their legislative profiles in service of their individual constituencies were their top priorities and that some degree of political assimilation within the House of Representatives would be necessary to achieve these profiles. At the start of the 94th Congress, the CBC adopted a series of reforms aimed at smoothing their assimilation into the Democratic Party Caucus and boosting their effectiveness as legislators within the House chamber (Barnett 1975, 41– 44; Barnett 1977, 23–25). Barnett saw the CBC’s efforts to focus more on legislation in the 94th Congress as a success. Despite this fact, she remained somewhat circumspect about the future prospects of the CBC for two reasons. First, she believed that racial politics in the United States would always create conditions that would make it necessary for African American legislators to “oscillate” between the “collective” and “ethnic” representational styles (1977, 48– 50). Second, Barnett feared that the cross-pressures African American legislators faced to “represent blacks collectively as a holistic unit” and deal with their “individual political circumstances” might stifle their ability to pass legislation (1977, 50). A second wave of largely quantitative scholarship on African American legislators has taken up the question of their status within the Democratic Party’s caucus in the House of Representatives. The consensus within the literature is that Barnett’s fears about the Congressional Black Caucus achieving only a tenuous institutionalization in the House of Representatives were not realized. On the contrary, African American legislators are now fully integrated into the Democratic Party’s Caucus in the House of Representatives. Indeed, CBC members routinely serve as the chairs of powerful standing committees and in senior leadership posts within the Democratic Party’s hierarchy (Bositis 1994, 18–21; Haynie 2005; Minta 2011, 62–64; Singh 1998, 175–178; Tate 2014, 22–25; Tillery Jr 1999). Moreover, a raft of recent quantitative studies examining the roll-call votes of CBC members have found that more often than not they take their cues from the Democratic leadership on most pieces of legislation (Canon 1999; Sinclair-Chapman 2002; Tate 2003; Tate 2014). In short, African American legislators have achieved a level of integration into the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives that could not have been foreseen in the 1970s. The fact that the median members of the CBC and the Democratic Party’s Caucus in the House of Representatives now tend to converge on roll-call votes does not mean, as Swain (1995) has argued, that African American and white legislators provide identical representation to African American constituents. On the contrary, the second wave literature has identified several ways in which African American legislators provide distinctive representation and unique benefits to their African American constituents and the entire nation. Tate’s (2003) analyses of the 103rd and 104th Congresses, for example, found that “Black Democrats’ voting behavior as measured by Poole and Rosenthal [was] significantly more consistent with the liberal Democratic party agenda than that of White and other minority Democratic legislators” (p. 85). In other words, despite voting with their party

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on the overwhelming majority of roll-call votes, African American legislators have demonstrated a persistent willingness to break ranks in order to promote and defend liberal policies on the floor of the House of Representatives. Moreover, several studies have shown that African American legislators are far more likely than their white counterparts to introduce and champion bills advancing the interests of African Americans in both committees and on the House floor (Canon 1999; Gamble 2007; Grose 2011; Minta 2009; Minta and Sinclair-Chapman 2013; Anderson, Box-Steffensmeier, and SinclairChapman 2003; Tate 2003; Whitby 2000). The fact that African American legislators as a group demonstrate a higher level of commitment to representing the interests of African Americans does not mean that there is unanimity within the CBC on every policy matter. On the contrary, Brown, Minta, and Sinclair-Chapman (2016) have illustrated through an analysis of C-SPAN oral histories that the founding generation of CBC members strived to develop distinct legislative styles on both racial and nonracial issues. It is also clear that not every CBC member demonstrates an equal commitment to carrying the burden of representing African American interests in Congress. Indeed, there is broad consensus within re...