State Lawmakers Pulled Between Local Voters and Congressional Debates, Twitter Data Shows

What the Study Asks

This paper by Andreu Casas, Oscar Stuhler, Julia Payson, Joshua A. Tucker, Richard Bonneau, and Jonathan Nagler asks who shapes the issue-attention cycle of state legislators: local actors, regional media, or national leaders. The question matters because state legislatures make consequential policy choices, yet researchers have struggled to observe how state-level agendas form and shift over time.

How the Authors Study It

The authors compile more than 122 million Twitter messages posted by state and national political actors in 2018 and 2021. They pair supervised machine learning to classify tweets by issue with time-series techniques that track temporal lead-lag relationships between actors’ attention. This design lets them test whether changes in the prominence of issues among voters, regional media, or members of Congress precede and predict issue emphasis by state legislators.

Key Findings

• State legislators sit at the confluence of national and local influences rather than being driven by only one source.
• Consistent with concerns about the nationalization of state politics, legislators reliably respond to policy debates among members of Congress.
• Legislators also show strong responsiveness to members of the public within their states, indicating meaningful bottom-up influence.
• Regional media exert a more moderate effect on state lawmakers’ issue attention.

Why This Matters for Students and Practitioners

The results suggest that state-level agenda setting reflects both national cues from Congress and local pressures from constituents, rather than being purely top-down or bottom-up. For scholars, the study demonstrates the value of large-scale social media data combined with supervised classification and time-series methods for tracing agenda dynamics. For policymakers and advocates, it implies that both national messaging and targeted local outreach can shift what state lawmakers prioritize.