Entrepreneurs of Conflict: Media Attention without Consequences

Personal attacks and hostility mire modern American politics. Politicians seem to expect that insults will increase media attention, improve campaign donations, and build a path to higher office, regardless of the potential harm this behavior might inflict on American institutions. We introduce a new, massive dataset of 1.2 million political texts, merged with millions of campaign contributions, appearances from 26,000 hours of cable news television, and thousands of congressional votes and bills. With these data, we identify representatives whose brand is political division---conflict entrepreneurs. We proceed to show that while the media reward conflict entrepreneurs with disproportionate coverage, this coverage does not relate to meaningful dividends. Our results suggest that conflict entrepreneurs, relative to policy-focused representatives, do not convert media attention into success: they do not raise more campaign donations, they do not perform better in elections, they are assigned to less powerful committees, and they do not leverage media attention to introduce or co-sponsor legislation. The absence of voter and donor sanctioning and increased media attention helps explain why many politicians resort to insults despite widespread public disapproval of such tactics.