What Would You Say? Estimating Causal Effects of Social Context on Political Expression

I develop a survey method for estimating social influence over individual political expression, by combining the content-richness of document scaling with the flexibility of survey research. I introduce the “What Would You Say?” question, which measures self-reported usage of political catchphrases in a hypothetical social context, which I manipulate in a between-subjects experiment. Using Wordsticks, an ordinal item response theory model inspired by Wordfish, I estimate each respondent’s lexical ideology and outspokenness, scaling their political lexicon in a two-dimensional space. I then identify self-censorship and preference falsification as causal effects of social context on respondents’ outspokenness and lexical ideology, respectively. This improves upon existing survey measures of political expression: it avoids conflating expressive behavior with populist attitudes, it defines preference falsification in terms of code-switching, and it moves beyond trait measures of self-censorship, to characterize relative shifts in the content of expression between different contexts. I validate the method and present experiments demonstrating its application to contemporary concerns about self-censorship and polarization, and I conclude by discussing its interpretation and future uses.