Journal
AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW
Volume 113, Issue 4, Pages 883-901Publisher
CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1017/S0003055419000352
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Funding
- INSPIRE program of the National Science Foundation [1248077]
- Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
- William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
- Rita Allen Foundation
- John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
- Intel
- Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
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Are legislators responsive to the priorities of the public? Research demonstrates a strong correspondence between the issues about which the public cares and the issues addressed by politicians, but conclusive evidence about who leads whom in setting the political agenda has yet to be uncovered. We answer this question with fine-grained temporal analyses of Twitter messages by legislators and the public during the 113thUSCongress. After employing an unsupervised methodthat classifies tweets sent by legislators and citizens into topics, we use vector autoregression models to explore whose priorities more strongly predict the relationship between citizens and politicians. We find that legislators are more likely to follow, than to lead, discussion of public issues, results that hold even after controlling for the agenda-setting effects of the media. We also find, however, that legislators are more likely to be responsive to their supporters than to the general public.
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