Needs To Be Done: Congressional Campaign Messaging and Critical Information Needs

This dissertation is about American congressional candidates’ production of publicly available and relevant information about the COVID-19 crisis on Twitter in 2020 and early 2021. American politicians are highly influential and well-connected communicators, enjoying access to an extensive information infrastructure, public credibility, and large audiences. Their influence is magnified by the steep decline of American journalism over the last two decades or so, and by politicians’ use of social media to communicate directly to the public. Especially in election years, politicians take positions on salient issues and events to present themselves as appealing candidates for office. Despite the ample sociology, political science, and political communication literatures on campaign messaging and strategy, American politicians have not been analyzed as providers of critical information for the public during national crises. Research on the COVID-19 pandemic shows that politically polarized responses to the crisis contributed to its severity in the United States, with elite discourse fomenting public skepticism of mitigation measures. Using the pandemic and the concurrent 2020 election as a case study, this dissertation asks two questions: how the cultural structures surrounding the institution of Congress and the medium of Twitter shaped congressional candidates’ interpretive packages of different aspects of the crisis, and what critical information candidates did or did not provide to the public through their campaign messaging as a result. To answer these questions, I employ a qualitative analysis of the pandemic-related tweets, retweets, and links produced by candidates in 4 House and 4 Senate races between late January and the end of April, 2020, and between October 1, 2020 and January 31, 2021.