Who Leads? Who Follows? Measuring Issue Attention and Agenda Setting by Legislators and the Mass Public Using Social Media Data

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 113th US Congress. After employing an unsupervised method that 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…

• NS
  National Science Foundation

  Award: 1248077
• BA
  Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
• AP
  Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
• GA
  Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
• RA
  Rita Allen Foundation
• WA
  William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
• JS
  John S. and James L. Knight Foundation