The Increasingly Negative Partisanship of Republican Elites We develop a broadly applicable class of coevolving latent space network with attractors (CLSNA) models. We apply the CLSNA to understand the dynamics of partisan polarization on social media, where we expect Republicans and Democrats to increasingly interact with their own party and disengage with the opposing party. Our analysis confirms the existence of partisan polarization in social media interactions among both political elites and the public. Moreover, while positive partisanship is the driving force of interactions across the full periods of study for both the public and Democratic elites, negative partisanship has come to dominate Republican elites’ interactions since the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.
