“Who Are You Calling a Hypocrite?”: Hypocrisy Accusations in American Political Digital Spheres

Accusations of hypocrisy are a perennial feature of American political discourse. Alleging hypocrisy is an easy and efficient way to attack a political rival, and is perhaps the only rhetorical move available in a polarized polity in which moral persuasion appears impossible. The advent of social media, with its emphasis on authenticity and preference for brevity, further exacerbates this dynamic. Is such a public preoccupation with hypocrisy good or bad for democracy? Disagreement exists between those who see it as a boon—exposing wrongdoing and upholding commonly held values—and those who view it as a liability, encouraging cynicism and relativism and distracting from action. An examination of whether hypocrisy allegations are commonly made in the context of policy critiques or ad hominem attacks can shed light on this debate. Furthermore, while a preoccupation with hypocrisy appears universal, partisan actors may be vulnerable to such allegations in different ways. Understanding these dynamics offers insights into contemporary political discourse, revealing the values political camps are perceived as being yoked to. Addressing these gaps, I ask: Do political camps – liberal\conservative – differ in the volume of accusations of hypocrisy targeted against them on Twitter? Do political camps differ in the characteristics of hypocrisy accusations – the target, values violated, or type of hypocrisy – levied against them on Twitter? To address these questions, this study uses a mixed-methods analysis of hypocrisy accusations in discourse surrounding values on Twitter in English between 2019 and 2021. I employ natural language processing (NLP) techniques—including textual co-occurrence networks, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling, TF-IDF vectorization, Word2Vec embeddings, and Named Entity Recognition— to identify key themes, actors, and sentiments surrounding hypocrisy allegations. Following this, I carry out a close a quantitative examination of tweets containing central keywords to deepen our understanding of the nature of such accusations. I find that mentions of hypocrisy and values are overwhelmingly political and polemical, with the majority targeting Republicans. Central to these accusations is the figure of Donald Trump, with Republican support for the 45th president commonly framed as emblematic of a deep hypocrisy, perceived as contradicting long-held conservative tenets such as Christian, family, and pro-life values. The incongruences pointed to in such accusations included both personal behavior (such as sexual scandals) and policy choices (such as family separation). Hypocrisy discourse is much less focused on Democrats: a discourse accusing liberals of hypocrisy (for example, for supporting both lockdown measures and massive BLM protests in 2020) was found but were much less prominently. A secondary finding is the existence of an anti-American discourse targeting American values themselves (such as human rights and democracy) as being hypocritically held, particularly regarding foreign policy. We understand these findings in the context of the President in power during most data collection (Trump), and interpret them as highlighting the political usefulness of hypocrisy allegations for opposition forces intent on attacking those in power.