Black lives matter messaging across multiple congressional communication mediums

Abstract

ABSTRACTAfter the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement had a second, large attention surge. Media focus intensified and public opinion of the movement was the most supportive it had ever been. Legislators got involved too, taking to their e-newsletters, Facebook, Twitter, and press releases to publicize support or opposition to the movement. Using those four mediums we ask which sorts of legislators were more or less likely to make public their position, and how these trends vary by medium. Partisanship drives the biggest differences, but that within parties, legislators with more extreme roll-call voting histories, and those from districts expressing greater perceptions of racism tend to be more likely to discuss their positions in explicit and oblique ways. Black legislators and those with greater shares of Black constituents do not seem to have distinct patterns of signaling support or opposition.KEYWORDS: Black Lives Matterpolitical communicationracemovementsCongress Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Will Hurd did not seek re-election in 2020.2 The manner of identifying the race of a user in this study was by visual determination made by the author, so the results ought to be taken with reasonable caution.3 CrowdTangle is the platform created by Facebook that permits academic and research work on the public groups and persons on Facebook by application on a case-by-case basis.4 ProPublica Represent Collection maintained by Derek Willis, Allison McCartney and Jeremy B. Merrill at: https://projects.propublica.org/represent/5 The six questions that comprise the perception of racism scale are: (1) Irish, Italians, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors; (2) Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class; (3) Over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve; (4) It’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough, if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites; (5) White people in the U.S. have certain advantages because of the color of their skin; and (6) Racial problems in the U.S. are rare, isolated situations.6 The Propublica legislator database of current and former legislators available here: https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-legislators7 The decision to assess additional words that are implicit anti-Black Lives Matters terms was made after the initial data collection and thus limited our analyses of these frames to the medium of e-newsletters which are continuously maintained at DCinbox.com. We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.8 Nine of these communications refer to the 1969 Stonewall riots because Pride month celebrations also take place annually during June which is in our time window.9 Though there were 13 total references to “Blue Lives Matter” between 2016 and 2018.10 For a more in depth look at the misuse and misunderstanding of the term “All Lives Matter see (Atkins Citation2019).”11 There also were spikes of attention to Black Lives Matter in each of the other three mediums we analyzed.