As racial tensions flare amidst a global pandemic and national social justice upheaval, the centrality of structural racism has renewed old questions and raised new ones about where Asian Americans fit in U.S. politics. This paper provides an overview of the unique racial history of Asians in the United States and analyzes the implications of dynamic racialization and status for Asian Americans. In particular, we examine the dynamism of Asian Americans' racial positionality relative to historical shifts in economic-based conceptions of their desirability as workers in American capitalism. Taking history, power, and institutions of white supremacy into account, we analyze where Asian Americans fit in contemporary U.S. politics, presenting a better understanding of the persistent structures underlying racial inequality and developing a foundation from which Asian Americans can work to enhance equality.

Citizens in many US states and cities in recent years have pushed for various reforms of voting methods. This raises the important question of which reform will best meet both normative and practical goals of representative democracy. While also evaluating criticisms of it, we make the case in this article that approval voting is the simplest actionable response. More specifically, we argue that approval voting offers distinct advantages, not only relative to the status quo of plurality voting, but also relative to alternative reforms. By giving voters the ability to support multiple candidates equally, approval voting grants true agency to the electorate to select strong winners among a candidate pool that is more competitive, diverse, and responsive to what voters want. As a low-cost yet high-impact electoral reform, the implementation of approval voting can create meaningful and lasting improvements in the quality of representation and policies.

Moral rhetoric presents a strategic dilemma for female politicians, who must navigate stereotypes while appealing to copartisan voters. In this article, we investigate how gender shapes elite moral rhetoric given the influence of partisanship, ideology, gender stereotypes, and moral psychology. Drawing on moral foundations theory, we examine how female and male representatives differ in their emphasis on the five foundations of care, fairness, authority, loyalty, and purity. Using the Moral Foundations Dictionary, we analyze a corpus of 2.23 million tweets by U.S. Congress members between 2013 and 2021. We find that female representatives are more likely to emphasize care and less likely to emphasize authority and loyalty than their male peers. However, when subsetting by party, we find that gender effects are most pronounced among Democrats and largely negligible among Republicans. These findings offer insight into the rhetorical dynamics of political leadership at the intersection of gender and partisan identities.

Congressional candidates regularly turn their frustration into posts on Facebook, fueling extreme partisanship and “echo-chamber” dialogue with their negative sentiment. In this research, we provide new evidence demonstrating the power of that negative sentiment to elicit more user engagement on Facebook across various metrics, illustrating how congressional candidates’ use of negativity corresponds with greater negativity in public responses. To fully comprehend the impact of these online political messages, we use a dictionary-based computational approach to catalog the tone of US House of Representatives candidates’ messages on Facebook and the user responses they elicit during the 2020 election. This research speaks to the power of elite rhetoric to shape political climates and pairs candidate strategies with user responses—contributing new insights into the mechanisms for voter engagement.

How does the lack of institutional legislative and political power and influence in the House of Representatives shape politicians' rhetoric? In previous work, we found evidence that members of Congress in the minority party in the House and in the party opposing the president were more negative in the language that they used on Twitter. This pattern was even stronger when they were a part of the minority in a unified congress. In this project, we dive deeper into their negative tweets and outline different ways that they can use negative language, such as by attacking other politicians or branches of government or stating policy critiques, and theorize under what conditions we expect representatives to be more likely to use them. We offer a plan of how to leverage almost 2 million unique tweets made by representatives from 2013-2018 (soon to be brought up to date to 2020) to assess the impact of a representative's political power, or relative lack thereof, on her use of different methods of strategic negative sentiment in her tweets. Given the increasing contention between the two parties on-and offline, it is unlikely that the use of negative rhetoric and its potentially harmful impact on American government and congress will decrease in the near future. By better understanding what representatives say on Twitter, we can better understand the impacts of their public statements on the platform.