How partisan group composition shapes divisive political debate

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• Department of Political and Social Sciences

As politics becomes increasingly polarised, there is mounting concern that people are less willing to listen to each other across political divides. While there is evidence that partisan echo chambers increase polarisation, we know much less about how such interactions influence the nature of political discussion. This paper directly examines how such echo chambers affect political discussion using speech data from a lab-in-the-field experiment in Britain. We argue that discussion with like-minded partisans, as opposed to those on the other side of the divide, generates more affective rhetoric. We test this by randomly assigning partisans to discuss a divisive political policy with either co-partisans or out-partisans in a discussion setting. Using deep learning to analyse the discussion content, we find that people in echo chambers are more likely to use negative emotive rhetoric than those in cross-party groups. These findings shed light on a critical mechanism by which partisan echo chambers may exacerbate existing divisions.

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