This is How the American Public Loses Faith in Government

Washington DC – The Federal Government of the United States shut down on January 20, 2018 because our elected officials could not agree on how to pay our bills. Everyone knew that Congress and the President needed to agree on a budget, but they could not figure out a way forward. Since this shutdown is the result of political positioning with both sides maneuvering to “win” the spin battle (although America as a whole loses), we thought that we would help hasten the process along by analyzing and publishing how Americans respond on social media. 

Every day for the duration of this shutdown, we will analyze the prevailing mood of America on social media. This is NOT a survey, and we cannot extrapolate how all Americans feel about the issue, but given the fast pace and ever-changing nature of the debate, this provides a glimpse of how this fight plays in America outside the Beltway. 

The large majority of social media conversation, in excess of 60%, blames both Republicans and Democrats for the shutdown. About one in three Americans on social media blame one party more than the other. Among these, Republicans receive significantly more blame than Democrats, exceeding a four to one ratio, or about 30% of the total blame. 

The tone of conversation online is decidedly negative with the harshest criticism being deployed against both parties. Looking at the tone of conversation blaming Democrats versus Republicans, the tweets et al. attacking Democrats are more negative than those blaming Republicans. This is potentially due to Republican messaging which carries a more overtly negative connotation compared to Democratic messaging. 

Social media discussion of the shutdown is spread across the entire United States with notable hot-spots in the major population states of New York and California. Given those states’ partisan lean (Democratic), it is not surprising that sentiment blaming Republicans is particularly high in these locations. 

Social media traffic in Texas, a Republican state and the second largest population state in the country, appears to be slightly lower than seen in New York. Here too we see more Americans blaming Republicans than Democrats, but the margin is much narrower than seen in California or New York. 

The social media conversation on day one of the shutdown is overwhelmingly negative in tone. Americans on social media are particularly damning when talking about both parties indicating that for many, the blame goes around to everyone. Earlier in the day, conversations associated with (blaming) Democrats were much more negative in tone than those associated with Republicans. However, as the day continued, those overall sentiment levels converged. 

Looking at the pace of conversation, anti-Republican messaging (i.e. #TrumpShutdown) was produced and shared at a much higher rate than anti-Democratic messaging (#ShumerShutdown) with anti-Republican messaging being generated at about four times the rate of anti-Democratic messaging at the time of the shutdown. The overall rate of sharing dropped through the morning then spiked again as morning news consumption began. At 8am ET, the ratio of 4-1 against the Republicans continued although traffic again declined in the afternoon. 

At the end of the day, elected officials will be responsive if they feel enough pressure from their constituents. If you want to register your concern with this shutdown, you can find your Member of Congress at this link. You can find your Senators at this link. 
Methodology

•    Step 1: A random sample of 150,000 tweets, Facebook and Reddit statements about the government shutdown was collected from 0000 EST/1300 EST on 1/20/2018. The sample included both Democrat-leaning (e.g. #Trumpshutdown), Republican-leaning (e.g. #Schumershutdown) and overtly neutral (e.g. #govtshutdown) hashtags and thematic statements. The sample represented an estimated 1/10 of the entire conversation taking place during this time. 

•    Step 2: The average compound sentiment score (CSS) of comments mentioning different parties was calculated. The compound sentiment score is a continuous variable going from negative to positive and takes into consideration frequency of appearance of actors, organizations or topics next to, or associated with negative, positive and neutral comments.The lower the number, the more negative the sentiment. The CSS was calculated utilizing VADER lexicon in NLTK toolkit. (https://github.com/cjhutto/vaderSentiment) which has been specifically designed to extract measures of sentiment from social media. The CSS provides a useful characterization of whom did the American social media public blame for government shutdown. 

• Reference: Hutto, C.J. & Gilbert, E.E. (2014). VADER: A Parsimonious Rule-based Model for Sentiment Analysis of Social Media Text. Eighth International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM-14). Ann Arbor, MI, June 2014.

•    Step 3: The entire CSS-enriched sample was geo-coded and aggregated at the state level in order to provide a nation-wide view of the blame-related discussion. The characteristics included: 1) blame Republicans 2) blame Democrats 3) blame both 4) anti-party/anti-government messaging. 

•    Step 4: Velocity of the anti-Republican (e.g. #Trumpshutdown) vs. anti-Democratic (e.g. #Schumershutdown) messaging was calculated for entire time frame of the sample. Velocity is defined as speed of messaging per hour. Velocity provides a useful characteristic as to which side's narrative is winning and also helps to identify as to when a particular digital narrative is going on offensive.