The public‐facing policy agenda of state legislatures: The communication of public policy via twitter

Abstract

AbstractHow political actors choose which politics to focus on helps shape the outcome of the policy process. While the policy agenda of the federal government has received widespread attention, there is much less known about the policy agendas of the U.S. states. In this paper, we describe how and why states choose to have similar agendas. We rely on the Twitter activity of every state legislator in America to measure the attention that states pay to the categories developed in the Policy Agenda Project (PAP). We develop machine learning tools to measure the proportion of tweets from every state legislature from 2017 in each of the PAP policy topics. Our results show that states that the public‐facing policy agenda of a state legislature is correlated with the level of legislative professionalism and the partisan and ideological politics of the state. These results further our understanding of state policymaking and agenda setting.