Taunting Makes Its Way to Congress

Relegated primarily to elementary school playgrounds, taunting, name-calling, and insult-lobbing have made their way into the houses of Congress, according to a study released by Stanford and Harvard professors.

Assistant Professor Justin R. Grimmer of Stanford and University Professor Gary King of Harvard found that 27 percent of congressional press releases that their team analyzed consisted of “partisan taunts.”

In fact, while on the job, not only do members of Congress insult each other, but they sometimes make it their primary goal, King said.

The methodology used could eventually reveal who in Congress are the biggest taunters.

This finding was couched in an eight-page paper published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in February.

The research focused on finding a way to have computers classify data in order to discover “insightful conceptualizations.”

“We are really lame at zooming out and making sense of the whole corpus of information, at the same time,” King said.

The study started by analyzing press releases from Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg, a Democrat from New Jersey who famously called Republicans “chicken hawks” in a floor speech in the Senate.

The study took these releases for an initial test of the methodology, which involves creating clusters of similar data.

After also analyzing a State of the Union address from President Bush and a series of Reuters articles, the team took 64,033 press releases from 2005 to 2007 to estimate the presence of taunting.

From those releases, Grimmer and King found not only that 27 percent of releases are taunts, but that taunting increases when a senator faces less competition in his or her state.

The study began more than three years ago, when it was initiated by King and a group of graduate students.

The goal of the study was to develop a way to understand large quantities of information.

Now, King hopes to be able to determine whether Democrats or Republicans are responsible for the majority of political put-downs and whether taunts tend to be employed by particular congressmen over others.

Still, King didn’t hold congressmen solely responsible for the taunting, saying that they seem to be responding to incentives and doing the exact things that get them reelected.

“The whole point of democracy is to represent, and if they want to do so by taunting each other, they will keep doing just that,” King said.