Replication Note: What is Political Incivility?

Abstract

Because political incivility is so consequential and those consequences depend on observers’ perceptions, we must know what Americans perceive as uncivil. Stryker, Conway, and Danielson (2016) conducted one of the first studies addressing this using confirmatory factor analysis on 23 types of potential incivility, but the authors used a local sample representing undergraduates at one southwestern university. Using 20 of their 23 measures and replicating their analyses on a national sample of more than 2000 respondents representing U.S. whites, Blacks, and Latinx, this study finds the same conceptual structure for perceived political incivility with very similar response patterns as Stryker et al. (2016). Perceived political incivility is an overarching construct with three analytically distinct, inter-correlated dimensions: insulting utterances, deception, and behaviors that tend to shut down ongoing and inclusive discussion.