Tweeting cheap talk: Elites' communication strategies during corruption scandals

Tweeting cheap talk: Elites' communication strategies during corruption scandals, co-authored with Jason Gainous, Mayra Vélez-Serrano, Kevin M. Wagner, You Wu, and Weiheng "Mark" Liu. Presented at the 80th Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, 2023. Published OnlineFirst in International Political Science Review on May 9, 2026. DOI: 10.1177/01925121261429933.

The question

Politicians routinely promise to fight corruption; far fewer push substantive reform. When a scandal breaks, who chooses to speak about it online, and in what language? Do political elites make concrete proposals—what we call reform-committed talk—or perform concern without accepting any course of action, what we call cheap talk?

The case

The paper studies Puerto Rico from 2014 to 2021. Two major parties, PNP and PPD, alternated in power, while smaller parties held seats without a governing majority. Across this period, we coded 43 corruption-related events, including the 2019 crisis and protests that led Governor Ricardo Rosselló to resign, and collected public Twitter posts from governors and legislators across the party system.

The method

• Data: posts were collected with Python and filtered to 3-day windows around the 43 events, producing 8,697 tweets from 143 elected officials
• Topic models: Latent Dirichlet Allocation across 16 subsets defined by party, corruption-keyword presence, and event timing, with model choices evaluated using topic coherence
• Dictionary: a Spanish-language corruption dictionary built from public news coverage and corruption-related terms surfaced by the topic models, separating cheap-talk vocabulary from reform-committed vocabulary
• Index: each legislator received a continuous score from −1, indicating cheap talk, to +1, indicating reform-committed language. We then estimated the relationship between majority-party status and that score while controlling for sentiment, electoral context, institutional position, age, and gender

What we found

Two findings stayed at the center of the paper.

First, major-party politicians rarely discussed corruption around scandals involving the major parties. In the most restrictive event-level subsets, only one to nine relevant tweets remained. The strategy appeared not only in vague language, but in silence.

Second, the legislator-level index points the same way. After the specified controls, majority-party status predicts less reform-committed language (β = −0.001, p = 0.01). Sentiment is not statistically significant. The difference is not how angry the language sounds, but whether it points toward institutional reform at all.

Smaller parties show the opposite pattern: they discuss corruption more often and use more reform-oriented language. We interpret the asymmetry through incumbency incentives. Political actors who benefit from the status quo face greater costs from institutional reform, and their public communication reflects that position.

The paper sits between communication research and political economy. Eight years of public events in a relatively compact party system let us see how access to power shapes not only what political elites say, but whether they choose to speak at all.