Jacob Jensen, Suresh Naidu, Ethan Kaplan, and Laurence Wilse-Samson: Political Polarization and the Dynamics of Political Language: Evidence from 130 Years of Partisan Speech: "We... study the polarization of political discourse and the diffusion of political language since 1873. We statistically identify highly partisan phrases from the Congressional Record and then use these to impute partisanship and political polarization to the Google Books corpus.... We also find that polarization of discourse in books predicts legislative gridlock, but polarization of congressional language does not.... We find that polarized phrases increase in frequency in Google Books before their use increases in congressional speech. Our evidence is consistent with an autonomous effect of elite discourse on congressional speech and legislative gridlock, but this effect is not large enough to drive the recent increase in congressional polarization...
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