A new study conducted by Haystaq Fellow and Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Mary Washington Chad Murphy finds that Democrats in Congress are actually more negative about “Obamacare” than their Republican counterparts, while both parties view “healthcare” much more positively.

Derek Willis at The Upshot recently published an article about the decline in the use of the word “Obamacare” in congressional news releases, arguing that it seems to be “shrinking as a political issue.” He finds that this summer, members of Congress only used the word “Obamacare” 138 times this summer compared to 530 times during the same time period last year. He also noted on Twitter that Democrats are much more likely to use the phrase “Affordable Care Act” than “Obamacare” by a 16:1 margin. Does this gap in language between the two parties matter?

Many news organizations and polling firms have shown differences in survey responses depending on what people call the act, and there was of course Jimmy Kimmel’s take on this issue. But there is surprisingly little research into how politicians frame the healthcare law. So to answer this question, we used the Capitol Words API to download all congressional speeches in the most recent Congress. We then used DW-NOMINATE scores to rank the members in terms of ideology and divide them into five quintiles (most liberal, liberal, moderate, conservative, and most conservative). Finally, we applied the HiDEx model to analyze the sentiment of each of these groups for “Obamacare” and “healthcare.” Our results were surprising.

In the graph, positive numbers represent positive sentiment toward the concept, while negative numbers represent negative sentiment. As the figure shows, when Democrats use the frame “Obamacare” they are actually more negative than Republicans, with the second most liberal quintile being the most negative about the word.

This doesn’t mean that Democrats are more negative toward the “Affordable Care Act,” instead it means that Democrats have potentially internalized the negativity of the frame, while Republicans are potentially more likely to use “Obamacare” as a colloquial title with less emotion attached to the word itself. While they label it “Obamacare” less frequently than their Republican counterparts, they do so more negatively, which would possibly help explain why the term has such power in public discourse. Democratic members of Congress dislike “Obamacare” even as they’re more likely to support the “Affordable Care Act”.

Most of the research on women’s representation looks at the types of policies Congress passes, and whether women vote for more “pro-women” policies than their male counterparts. Academic research on this topic is mixed, with some scholars finding overall differences between women and men in Congress, others finding differences on specific issues, and others finding no difference at all between the two groups. While this has been a hot topic in political science for several decades, we still don’t have a definitive answer for whether men and women represent their constituents differently.

This research typically relies on roll call votes – that is to say whether women are more likely to vote “yes” on legislation that men vote “no” on. Roll call data have a number of limitations, and just because they are the easiest data to access doesn’t mean they are the right data. To answer this unresolved question, we looked in a different place: speeches.

Speeches, specifically Senate floor speeches, give us better leverage on the question for  three reasons.

1. They can be on any topic the Senator chooses
2. They can be measured on virtually infinite dimensions rather than a forced “yes/no” dichotomy
3. Politicians speak far more than they vote, giving us bigger data

By looking at all Senate floor speeches in the 112^th Congress (2011-2012), and comparing men and women in a high-dimensional model of word co-occurrence called HiDEx, we were able to compute a “semantic differential” score for a number of different words representing women’s issues. We found a few significant differences between men and women.

We present our findings in the figure, and the full working paper is available on Academia.edu. We show that women were more likely to describe other women and healthcare positively than men were, while they were more likely to describe guns negatively. They were also more likely to describe abortion as being about “choice” than “life.” But most strikingly, women linked other more closely to “work” rather than “home.” This shows a fundamental difference in worldviews between men and women, and a fundamental difference in how the different genders view the role of women in the modern world. These findings hold even when controlling for partisanship.

By applying a novel analysis to an old question we were not only able to help bring new evidence to a debate in the academic literature, but we were able to learn more about the differences between men and women than we would have if we only looked where everyone else was looking. Finding a new dataset and applying a more sophisticated, high-dimensional analysis gives us the advantage and shows differences that weren’t otherwise apparent.