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| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.06550 |
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| _version_ | 1866912692367785984 |
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| author | Bilotta, Francesco Binetti, Alberto Manferdini, Giacomo |
| author_facet | Bilotta, Francesco Binetti, Alberto Manferdini, Giacomo |
| contents | This paper studies the supply and effects of causal rhetoric in U.S. politics. We define causal rhetoric as assigning responsibility for political outcomes, via claims of blame and merit. Training a supervised classifier, we detect causal rhetoric in over a decade of congressional tweets, finding that its supply has risen rapidly and pervasively, displacing affective messaging. We show that the production of causal rhetoric involves a trade-off between revenues and costs. First, quasi-random variation in Twitter adoption shows that blame increases small-donor revenues by expanding donor count, while merit raises average donation size. Second, fine-grained legislative data suggest that policy ownership determines relative costs: blame is cheaper for opponents, merit for proposers. Finally, causal rhetoric has downstream effects on societal outcomes, fostering protest activity and shaping polarization and institutional trust. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_06550 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Blameocracy: Causal Rhetoric in Politics Bilotta, Francesco Binetti, Alberto Manferdini, Giacomo General Economics Economics This paper studies the supply and effects of causal rhetoric in U.S. politics. We define causal rhetoric as assigning responsibility for political outcomes, via claims of blame and merit. Training a supervised classifier, we detect causal rhetoric in over a decade of congressional tweets, finding that its supply has risen rapidly and pervasively, displacing affective messaging. We show that the production of causal rhetoric involves a trade-off between revenues and costs. First, quasi-random variation in Twitter adoption shows that blame increases small-donor revenues by expanding donor count, while merit raises average donation size. Second, fine-grained legislative data suggest that policy ownership determines relative costs: blame is cheaper for opponents, merit for proposers. Finally, causal rhetoric has downstream effects on societal outcomes, fostering protest activity and shaping polarization and institutional trust. |
| title | Blameocracy: Causal Rhetoric in Politics |
| topic | General Economics Economics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.06550 |