From Incivility to Outrage: Political Discourse in Blogs, Talk Radio, and Cable News

Most research on incivility in American politics focuses on its effects on citizens' political attitudes and behaviors, in spite of remarkably little data on the extent to which political discourse is actually uncivil. Those studies that do examine content focus on negative campaign advertisements, overlooking more egregious forms of political incivility that penetrate the broader media landscape. In this study, we attempt to conceptualize and measure more dramatic types of political incivility, which we term “outrage.” Outrage discourse involves efforts to provoke a visceral response from the audience, usually in the form of anger, fear, or moral righteousness through the use of overgeneralizations,…