Research

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.

In January 2023, Louisiana enacted Act 440, requiring websites containing substantial adult content to verify users’ ages through government-issued identification or commercial verification services. Since the passing of this legislation, 17 additional states have adopted similar laws. Using Google Trends data and a preregistered synthetic control design, this paper examines the impact of these age verification requirements on digital behavior across four key dimensions: searches for the largest compliant website, the largest non-compliant website, VPN services, and adult content generally.Three months after the laws were passed, Our analysis reveals a 51% reduction in searches for the dominant compliant platform, accompanied by significant increases in searches for both the dominant non-compliant platform (48.1%) and VPN services (23.6%). Through multiverse analyses that incorporate multiple specifications and control group constructions, we demonstrate the robustness of these behavioral changes. Our point estimates remain consistent with our pre-registered hypotheses across 3,200 point estimates. Our findings highlight that while these regulation efforts reduce traffic to compliant firms and likely a net reduction overall to this type of content, individuals adapt primarily by moving to content providers that do not require age verification. Our methodological approach offers a framework for real-time policy evaluation in contexts with staggered treatment adoption.