Tweeting cheap talk: Elites’ communication strategies during corruption scandals

Abstract

Politicians often claim they will address corruption but rarely push substantive reforms. We argue they engage in “cheap talk” due to electoral incentives while avoiding reform that could weaken their position. Using Puerto Rico as a case, we analyzed legislators’ Twitter communications from 2014 to 2021, identifying 43 corruption scandals. Topic models reveal that major parties largely avoided corruption discussions unless tweets explicitly mentioned corruption keywords. Even then, discussions remained vague. In contrast, minor parties frequently engaged in reform-committed discourse. We also built a dictionary of corruption-related terms, identifying corruption tweets and modeling them against party status and sentiment. Results show that majority party members were less negative about corruption and more likely to engage in cheap talk. This suggests that major parties avoid substantive corruption discussions to maintain political power, whereas minor parties adopt a more policy-focused, reform-oriented stance.