Black Tea, Green Tea, White Tea, and Coffee: Understanding the Variation in Attachment to the Tea Party Among Members of Congress

Abstract

The Tea Party is the most significant political movement in 21st century American politics. First, it has had an extraordinary effect on the Republican Party. A boon to conservative Republicans, it has made life difficult for moderate Republicans, particularly those who are elected officials. Somewhat surprisingly, given the burgeoning literature on the mass-level Tea Party, the Tea Party in government has generated relatively less interest (or scholarship). And what research there is on the Tea Party in government suggests that the foundations of the movement in the mass public are not easily translatable into Tea Party legislators’ incentives or their actions (see, for example, Arceneaux and Nicholson 2011 and Gervais and Morris 2012). One reason for the dearth of research on the Tea Party in government is the difficulty associated with identifying which legislators are “true” Tea Party members. While Tea Party Caucus membership has been used to identify Tea Party members, it is a flawed measure, and now that it is dormant, it has lost even the limited usefulness it once had. In this paper, we address this limitation of the current literature. We use an array of different types of data to tap into a politician’s connection to the Tea Party. This data include campaign contributions from organizations explicitly tied to the Tea Party movement, endorsements from Tea Party organizations, and the prevalence of joint media references to individual politicians and the Tea Party. These data suggest that Tea Party attachment is a multi-dimensional variable. We label the various types of Tea Party supporters as Black Tea, Green Tea, White Tea, and Coffee, and we demonstrate that the ideological dispositions and institutional positions of members vary according to their type of Tea Party attachment. We conclude with a discussion of our future research and the significance of organized variation in Tea Party attachment for legislative policymaking.