Expressed Agendas of State Legislators

• In Event: New Measurements for Studying Representation in State Politics

Abstract

While previous research on agenda stating has eschewed state politics due to data limitations, we are now able to take advantage of the fact that most state legislators today use social media, and particularly Twitter, to discuss their issue preferences, making it easy to study the attention they pay to different policy issues across time. In this paper we use Twitter data and state-of-the-art topic modeling techniques to measure the expressed agenda of state legislators from fifteen U.S. states in 2018. We then use the data to address two questions that are crucial for our understanding of agenda setting and democratic politics more broadly; under what conditions do public representatives devote attention in their public communications to a) policy (rather than non-policy) issues, and b) particular policy issues.

Authors

• Julia Payson, New York University

• Andreu Casas, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

• Jonathan Nagler, New York University

• Joshua A. Tucker, New York University