Low Government Performance and Uncivil Political Tweets: Evidence from the COVID-19 Crisis in the U.S

Political expression through social media has already taken root as a form of political participation. However, it is less clear how a government's performance is linked with people's political expression on social media. The present study hypothesizes that when government performance worsens, people become frustrated and send uncivil messages to the government on social media. To test this hypothesis, the present study classified over 8 million tweets directed at U.S. state governors as uncivil or not, using a neural-network machine-learning model, and examined the impact of worsening state-level COVID-19 cases on the number of uncivil tweets directed at state governors. The results show that increasing state-level COVID-19 cases led to higher numbers of uncivil tweets against state governors. Then, the present study discusses the implications of the findings from two perspectives: non-institutionalized political participation and the importance of elections in democracies.