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Dangers, Toils, and Snares: U.S. Senators' Rhetoric of Public Insecurity and Religiosity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2020

Sarah K. Dreier Open the ORCID record for Sarah K. Dreier [Opens in a new window] ,
Emily K. Gade ,
John Wilkerson  and
Jonathan Schaeffer
Sarah K. Dreier*
Affiliation:
University of Washington
Emily K. Gade
Affiliation:
Emory University
John Wilkerson
Affiliation:
University of Washington
Jonathan Schaeffer
Affiliation:
University of Washington
*
Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Sarah K. Dreier, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington. E-mail: skdreier@uw.edu
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Abstract

How, and in what contexts, do U.S. senators publicly invoke religious rhetoric when engaging with their constituents? Do periods of heightened public anxiety make senators more likely to use religious rhetoric? We use the Internet Archive's 90-terabyte collection of material from the U.S. government's Internet domain (.gov) to evaluate the relationships between insecurity, anxiety, and religious rhetoric on senators' official websites. We estimate the association between a senator's use of anxiety-related terms on her official website in a given year (as a proportion of overall yearly words) and that senator's use of religious rhetoric (public-facing religiosity). We find a strong, positive association between senators' public display of anxious sentiments and public-facing religiosity in a given year. This research advances scholarly understanding of how U.S. legislators invoke religion in public spaces. It also models the use of “big data” sources and scalable, time-variant text-data approaches for measuring and analyzing religion and elite political behavior.

Type
Article
Information
Politics and Religion , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , September 2021 , pp. 460 - 483
Copyright
Copyright © Religion and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association 2020

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Footnotes

This research grew out of work conducted under National Science Foundation Award #1243917 and builds on Emily Gade's work conducted at the University of Washington's eScience Big Data Incubator (2014). The authors acknowledge the University of Washington's eScience Institute and Center for American Politics and Public Policy for providing training and support.We also thank Altiscale and Start Smart Labs (in particular Ellen Salisbury and Raymie Stata) for making this research possible by hosting the .gov collection on a public cluster and making it available to researchers free of charge. We received valuable feedback from Mark Smith, the Society for Political Methodology's PolMeth XXXV Conference (2018), the Conference on New Directions in Analyzing Text as Data (2017 and 2018), and the editors and reviewers at Politics & Religion. Any errors are our own. Replication files for this project are available at: https://github.com/ekgade/PoliticsAndRelgion_RepFiles.

References

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