Research

CSMaP is a leading academic research institute studying the ever-shifting online environment at scale. We publish peer-reviewed research in top academic journals, produce rigorous reports and analyses on policy relevant topics, and develop open source tools and methods to support the broader scholarly community.

Academic Research

  • Journal Article

    Bottom Up? Top Down? Determinants of Issue-Attention in State Politics

    The Journal of Politics, 2025

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    Who shapes the issue-attention cycle of state legislators? Although state governments make critical policy decisions, data and methodological constraints have limited researchers’ ability to study state-level agenda setting. For this paper, we collect more than 122 million Twitter messages sent by state and national actors in 2018 and 2021. We then employ supervised machine learning and time series techniques to study how the issue-attention of state lawmakers evolves vis-à-vis various local- and national-level actors. Our findings suggest that state legislators operate at the confluence of national and local influences. In line with arguments highlighting the nationalization of state politics, we find that state legislators are consistently responsive to policy debates among members of Congress. However, despite growing nationalization concerns, we also find strong evidence of issue responsiveness by legislators to members of the public in their states and moderate responsiveness to regional media sources.

    Date Posted

    Mar 28, 2025

  • Journal Article

    To Moderate, or Not to Moderate: Strategic Domain Sharing by Congressional Campaigns

    Electoral Studies, March 2025

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    We test whether candidates move to the extremes before a primary but then return to the center for the general election to appeal to the different preferences of each electorate. Incumbents are now more vulnerable to primary challenges than ever as social media offers a viable pathway for fundraising and messaging for challengers, while homogeneity of districts has reduced general election competitiveness. To assess candidates’ ideological trajectories, we estimate the messaging ideology of 2020 congressional campaigns before and after their primaries using a homophily-based measure of domains shared on Twitter. This method provides temporally granular data to observe changes in communication within a single election campaign cycle. We find suggestive evidence that incumbents in safe seats moved towards the extreme before their primaries and back towards the center for the general election, but only when threatened by a well-funded primary challenge.

    Date Posted

    Mar 17, 2025

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Reports & Analysis

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Data Collections & Tools

As part of our project to construct comprehensive data sets and to empirically test hypotheses related to social media and politics, we have developed a suite of open-source tools and modeling processes.