Relegated primarily to elementary school playgrounds, taunting, name-calling, and insult-lobbing have made their way into the houses of Congress, according to a study released by Stanford and Harvard professors.
Justin R. Grimmer of Stanford University and Gary King of Harvard University found that 27 percent of congressional press releases that their team analyzed consisted of “partisan taunts.”
The study started by analyzing press releases from Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg, a Democrat from New Jersey who famously called Republicans “chicken hawks” in a floor speech in the Senate.
After also analyzing a State of the Union address from President Bush and a series of Reuters articles, the team took 64,033 press releases from 2005 to 2007 to estimate the presence of taunting.
From those releases, Grimmer and King found that 27 percent of releases are taunts, and that taunting increases when a senator faces less competition in his or her state.
King hopes to be able to determine whether Democrats or Republicans are responsible for the majority of political put-downs and whether taunts tend to be employed by particular congressmen over others.
“The whole point of democracy is to represent, and if they want to do so by taunting each other, they will keep doing just that,” King said.
Paula I. Penariu is a student at Harvard University
