The Rhetorical "what Goes with What": Political Pundits and the Discursive Superstructure of Ideology in US Politics

In his foundational essay, Philip Converse (1964) alludes to a small class of political sophisticates who are influential in the social construction and diffusion of ideological belief systems. However, despite their importance to the nature of ideology in the public at large, there is little empirical research focusing on those select few involved in this process of "creative synthesis"- and work examining the rhetorical structures that cohere sets of plausibly independent issue stances is rarer still. I do so here using a novel dataset of tweets sent by roughly 1,000 of the most prominent political pundits in the United States from January through August of 2019. Using a combination of text and network-analytic techniques, I identify robust relationships between both how pundits discuss a wide range of political concepts and the extent to which this discussion is informative of their network-based preferences. I find that broad, organizing concepts such as partisan and ideological labels emerge as central in political discourse, facilitating indirect links between a wide range of issues. However, I also find that discussions of discrete policy issues and political concepts are highly informative of pundits' latent preferences. This descriptive account of the discursive superstructure of ideology offers new evidence regarding how creative synthesis is conducted in practice.

Duke Scholars

Author Jon Green Political Science