Jessie E. Munson

Research

Publications

Claiming and Blaming: How Minority Party Status Shapes Filibuster Framing in the U.S. Senate (Job Market Paper; Legislative Studies Quarterly)

Abstract: Why do senators choose to talk about filibustering, a tool widely associated with obstruction and gridlock? This paper examines how senators strategically reference filibustering in official communications, focusing on two rhetorical frames: credit claiming and blaming. Using an original dataset of Senate press releases from the 109th through 118th Congresses, I show that filibuster rhetoric is structured primarily by party status: minority-party senators claim credit for obstruction, while majority-party senators assign blame. Individual-level factors such as electoral safety and ideological extremity play a limited role. Contrary to expectations, filibuster credit claiming has declined over time, while evidence of increased blaming is mixed. Additional analyses show that these patterns persist across institutional contexts, including unified and divided government, respond to changes in filibuster rules for judicial nominations, and shift within senators as party control changes. Filibuster rhetoric serves as a strategic tool for signaling resistance and shifting blame.

“To Scrutinise and Protect: Question Time as a Window into Institutional and Electoral Incentives at Holyrood and Westminster”. 2020. Parliamentary Affairs.  With David C.W. Parker (Montana State University), and Caitlyn M. Richter

Abstract: Question Time is subject to problems of collective action and coordination. Individual parliamentarians seeking to build a personal vote are not incentivised to participate, despite the fact that the collective party brand affecting re-election is at risk during these highly publicised weekly spectacles. We analyse questions asked at First Minister’s Question Time during the first four sessions of the Scottish Parliament to examine the factors predicting whether and how parliamentarians chose to participate in oversight of the government. Despite the varied incentives provided by the Scottish Parliament’s electoral system, the total number of questions asked and the tone of those questions is largely a function of whether the Member of Scottish Parliament (MSP) is serving in the governing party or not.

Working Papers

Words and Deeds: Do Legislators' Public Messages Reflect Their Behind-the-Scenes Work with Federal Agencies? With Devin Judge-Lord (University of Michigan), Rochelle Snyder (Coe College) and Eleanor Powell (UW-Madison)

Abstract: Do legislators’ words match their deeds? We introduce “attention consistency” as a measure of representation, theorize conditions that should produce more consistency between public messaging and behavior in office, and test whether legislators’ public attention to federal agencies in constituent newsletters corresponds to their private engagement with those agencies. We find strong evidence of attention consistency in cross-sectional and within-member analyses. Robustness checks evaluating the relative distribution of legislator attention across agencies yield similar results. Legislators who publicly emphasize an agency engage more with that agency behind the scenes. We find no evidence that ideological distance from an agency conditions the consistency of legislators’ public and private attention to it. Similarly, while members of relevant oversight committees make more requests of agencies they oversee, we find no evidence that oversight membership conditions the consistency of legislators’ public and private attention to it. Our analyses show that legislators’ interests, as expressed in their attention to that agency in their newsletters, matter as much as institutional roles in shaping legislators’ behind-the-scenes interactions with federal agencies.

Football, #BlackLivesMatter, and #ThreeLions: What the 2021 Euro Championship Tells Us about the Politics of Race, Place-based Resentment, and the Representational Styles of English MPs.  With David C.W. Parker (UW-Platteville), Stran Knudson (MSU Undergraduate), Mesa McKee (MSU Undergraduate), and Heba Haq (UW-Madison Undergraduate)

Abstract: Members of the English football team expressed their support for racial justice and the Black Lives Matter movement by taking a knee during the Euro championship this summer—and were subjected to expressions of crowd disapproval, negative commentary from government ministers, and racist online abuse after losing to Italy in the finals. We explore in this paper how English MPs addressed the kneeling of the English team and the subsequent racist abuse faced by English players Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho, and Bukaya Saka as a window into the politics of place-based (Cramer, 2016; Goodhart, 2017) and racial resentment in British politics. Many scholars have used social media to gauge the representational styles and position-taking of legislators (e.g. Silva and Proksch, 2021). We gathered data on the twitter feeds of English MPs for six weeks this summer to analyse the positions they took on the controversy. We anticipate that MPs representing less racially diverse and more deprived constituencies were less likely to make note of the controversy on social media. We expect that MPs representing Red Wall constituencies—whether Labour or Conservative—to be particularly unlikely to express support for the targeted players when compared to their colleagues. We conclude by considering how the politics of place, the rise of the culture wars, and identity conflicts (Sobolweska and Ford, 2020) in British politics create representational dilemmas within both the Conservative and Labour Parties in England.

Works in Progress

Filibuster as Foil: How Senators Position Themselves on the Filibuster 

Abstract: How do legislators position themselves on the procedures of lawmaking? This paper examines how U.S. senators articulate their stance toward the filibuster in official communications. While a large literature studies position-taking on policy issues, less attention has been paid to how legislators communicate about the rules that structure policymaking. Using a dataset of Senate press releases spanning the 109th through 118th Congresses, I code statements by their procedural stance and aggregate them into broader measures of status quo defense and reform-oriented positioning. I find that filibuster positioning is rare and unevenly distributed: most senators never engage in this type of messaging, while a small number do so repeatedly. When positioning does occur, it appears in bursts in which both defenders of the filibuster and advocates of reform increase their communication at the same time. Ideology and party status both influence senators’ positioning, while nuclear option reforms exhibit inconsistent effects. These findings show that public positioning on the filibuster is neither routine nor one-sided. Instead, it emerges under specific political conditions and reflects both senators’ preferences over the rule and the institutional incentives they face. By shifting the study of position-taking from policy to procedure, this paper highlights how institutional rules themselves become objects of political communication.

The Vertical Politics of Misinformation: Election Narratives in Congress and State Legislatures With SoRelle Wycoff Gaynor (University of Virginia) and Jess Esplin (University of Wisconsin - Madison)

Abstract: This paper examines the diffusion of election misinformation across federal and state legislative institutions following the 2020 election and the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. Combining computational text analysis, network analysis, and state-level case studies, we assess how institutional relationships shape patterns of rhetorical similarity among lawmakers, and find that the spread of election denialism is strongly structured by institutional boundaries, with diffusion occurring primarily within, rather than across, chambers. While there is some evidence of horizontal diffusion among state legislators, cross-level transmission between federal and state actors is rare. These patterns appear to be driven by differences in message content: state legislators emphasize chamber-specific and locally salient issues, whereas members of Congress advance more polarized, nationalized narratives. Together, these findings highlight the importance of institutional context in structuring political communication and constrain expectations about the extent of cross-level message diffusion.

Evaluating Public Responses to Filibuster Messaging

Description: This paper tests how exposure to filibuster messaging affects public evaluations of obstruction and the senators discussing it, using a survey experiment focused on filibuster credit-claiming and blame.