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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.
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Journal Article
To Moderate, or Not to Moderate: Strategic Domain Sharing by Congressional Campaigns
Electoral Studies, March 2025
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.
Reports & Analysis
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Analysis
Latinos Who Use Spanish-Language Social Media Get More Misinformation
That could affect their votes — and their safety from covid-19.
November 8, 2022
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Analysis
Gender-Based Online Violence Spikes After Prominent Media Attacks
Our research finds that after a prominent male media personality targets a female journalist, the prevalence of hateful speech targeting those journalists increases in the immediate aftermath, often taking days to decrease.
January 26, 2022
News & Commentary
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News
Researchers Follow the Money to Illuminate US House Candidates’ Ideological Movement
New social media study finds safe incumbents move from primary extremes to general-election center when facing well-funded primary challenger
March 17, 2025
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News
2024 Year in Review: Our Research & Impact
A look at our top articles, events, and more from the past year.
December 18, 2024