United States

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.

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.