Original
Bottom-Up? Top-Down? Determinants of Issue Attention in State Politics
Abstract
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 article, 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.
中文
自下而上？自上而下？州政治中议题关注的決定因素
摘要
谁塑造了州议员的议题关注周期？尽管州政府做出关键的政策决定，但数据与方法上的限制一直制约着研究者对州级议程设置的研究。本文收集了2018年和2021年由州级与全国性行为体发布的超过1.22亿条推特消息，并运用监督式机器学习与时间序列技术，考察州议员的议题关注如何相对于各类地方层面和全国层面的行为体而演变。研究发现表明，州议员处于全国性影响与地方性影响的交汇处。与强调州政治全国化的论点相一致，我们发现州议员始终对国会议员之间的政策辩论作出回应。然而，尽管存在日益增长的全国化担忧，我们同样发现有力证据表明，州议员对所在州公众的议题作出回应，并对区域性媒体来源作出中等程度的回应。
关键词
州政治、议题关注、议程设置、政治回应性、州议员、推特、机器学习、美国政治全国化