James Snyder
Faculty, American Politics
Overview: In this project—joint with Shigeo Hirano at Columbia University—we study newspaper partisan behavior and content, which we measure using coverage and commentary of partisan activities, institutions and actors. We use this measure to describe the levels of relative partisan behavior during the period 1880 to 1900, and to describe changes over the period 1880 to 1980. We find that on average newspapers were initially highly partisan, but became gradually less partisan over time. Importantly, we find as much change after the 1910s as before, which differs from the existing literature that focuses on changes in the 19th and early 20th century. We also investigate words and phrases that had negative or positive partisan connotations in particular periods. Finally we examine whether some of the common hypotheses offered in the literature can account for the changes. The initial findings suggest that these explanations can only account for part of the decline.