2018 Election
Academic Research
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Journal Article
Bottom Up? Top Down? Determinants of Issue-Attention in State Politics
The Journal of Politics, 2025
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.
Reports & Analysis
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Analysis
Could Anything – Even Taylor Swift – Boost the Youth Vote in 2018?
Last week, Taylor Swift endorsed two candidates on Instagram, speaking to a group that could use encouragement: young people, who often fail to vote in midterm elections.
October 18, 2018