Tweeting cheap talk: Elites' communication strategies during corruption scandals

Tweeting cheap talk: Elites' communication strategies during corruption scandals, a co-authored paper with Jason Gainous, Mayra Vélez-Serrano, Kevin M. Wagner, Jialong Wang, 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 say they will fight corruption all the time. They rarely push substantive reform. Why? When a corruption scandal breaks, who engages with it on social media, and in what terms? Are political elites offering proposals, which we classify as reform-committed talk, or performing concern without committing to a course of action, which we classify as 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 matter.

First, major-party politicians discussed corruption infrequently around scandals involving the major parties. In the most restrictive event-level subsets, only 1 to 9 relevant tweets remained. Silence, not just vague language, was part of the communication strategy.

Second, the legislator-level index points in the same direction. Majority-party status predicts less reform-committed language (β = −0.001, p = 0.01) after the specified controls. The sentiment measures are not statistically significant, suggesting that the distinction is less about emotional intensity than about whether rhetoric points toward substantive reform.

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. A compact party system, observed across eight years of public events, makes it possible to study how access to power shapes not only what political elites say, but whether they choose to speak at all.