Annelise Russell
Biographic Data
| ID | 4123561 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Annelise Russell |
| GIVEN NAMES | Annelise |
| FAMILY NAME | Russell |
| SIGNATURE | RUSSELL A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Kentucky |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8417-1709 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 161 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Young Radical Response: Senators React to Trump Conviction
Objective Political Twitter is known for amplifying extreme views and polarizing rhetoric, and members of Congress capitalize on those fast‐paced news cycles to engage with trending topics. This research note uses the news of former President Donald Trump's conviction in his hush money trial to explain how U.S. senators engage with digital audiences, matching the more polarizing voices in the Senate with the ideological extremity of Twitter. Meth…
Rage on the Record: Angry Emotional Appeals in Congress
Members of Congress rely on social media to cultivate political narratives, with anger and an indignant message becoming increasingly central to their self-presentation. Given its heightened capacity for virality and mobilization, angry rhetoric serves as a powerful tool in political communication. This short article examines the role of partisan dynamics in fueling the escalation of angry rhetoric in representatives’ reputation-building online, …
U.S. Senators’ Tweets: The Tweets of Single-Minded Seekers of Donations
Twitter remains an indispensable tool for U.S. senators, serving as a means of constant exposure to an audience of reporters, advocates, and copartisans. Self-presentation in Congress is more nationalized, but despite the appeal of digital constituencies, lawmakers still leverage the platform to build a strong base of local bona fides within their state. In this short article, we investigate the link between senators presenting themselves as loca…
Reporting on Congress: Research Note on Journalists’ Norms in a Political Media Climate
Reporters covering Congress have adapted to a world where reporting reputations derive from Twitter/X followers and digital proximity. This short article examines the ways in which Twitter has impacted the norms and practices of political reporters and editors who have adapted to a Twitter-driven information climate. Drawing from literature on institutional adaptation, I consider the digital impact on the business of covering Congress, relying on…
Boosted and Branded: Congressional Advertising With Constituents
Members of Congress have an unprecedented number of ways to communicate with constituents, and this article examines the evolving strategies of representation by focusing on how members use paid advertising to engage with their districts. Prior research offers competing explanations for lawmakers' communication strategies—one ascribed to asymmetric patterns of partisan politics and another to electoral constraints. Drawing on a dataset of franked…
All Talk, No Action? Politicians’ Agenda Responsiveness to Citizens’ Engagement on Social Media
Studies have shown that citizens’ engagement on social media drives politicians to adapt the issues they discuss online. However, for representative democracy to function effectively, politicians must not only discuss these issues but also act on them. This paper explores whether higher citizens’ engagement on social media shapes the issues politicians address online and leads to substantive agenda responsiveness, such as proposing legislation or…
Information is cheap, but filtering is costly: Congressional investment in reference resources
Lawmakers who can supply themself with information to manage complex problems are at an advantage, but equally important is the filtering and contextualizing of applicable information. Members of Congress manage a deluge of policy and political information, and this short paper examines one strategy members of Congress use to mitigate that burden—by investing in reference material and news media to filter and summarize the policymaking environmen…
Redefining “expansion” in congressional communication: Homestyles for a digital constituency
Self‐presentation in Congress is more nationalized, with digital constituencies on platforms such as Twitter offering new reputation‐building opportunities. Digital constituencies transform traditional expectations of constituent communication, challenging Richard Fenno's theory that representatives adopt an “expansionist” style with constituents during early, vulnerable phases of their tenure. In a digital era that encourages a more national app…
Gendered Agenda-Building: How Female Candidates Communicate Heterogeneous Issue Agendas
This study investigates the extent to which the issues emphasized by female political candidates in American congressional elections vary based on the media platforms used to promote their messages. We develop a framework of gendered agenda-building, arguing that the pressures women face on the campaign trail are rooted in gender stereotypes and will lead women to curate more heterogeneous issue agendas compared to their male counterparts. Our fr…
Not ready to make nice: Congressional candidates’ emotional appeals on Twitter
Objective Congressional candidates use digital platforms to bolster and define their political reputation, and political stalemates over inflation, reproductive rights, and the lasting impact of Trump politics are fueling candidates’ emotionally charged rhetoric on Twitter, especially for women. Against the backdrop of President Donald Trump's presidency and the #MeToo movement, previous research has shown that women running for Congress are lead…
Rapid response and uncertain agendas: Senators' response to Dobbs
We examine policymakers' nuanced strategies of digital agenda setting during times of lawmaker uncertainty versus anticipated policy communication. Whereas existing agenda‐setting studies tend to focus on how policymakers allocate attention to preferred policies, we explain how policymakers react to an issue in a digital media climate where the expectation is engagement. We explore the dynamics of digital agenda setting with U.S. senators' Twitte…
Research Note: Comparing Traditional Presidential Rhetoric: Trump Versus Biden
Even though they both held the same office, Donald Trump and Joe Biden could not have presented themselves more differently. Biden presented himself as the restorer of tradition after Trump was the disruptor. In this research note, we examine seven sets of speeches that hold constant either the timing or the setting to see if their rhetoric contrasted as much as the way they presented themselves. We find that the words and emotions that they invo…
Constrained Communication and Negativity Bias: Gendered Emotional Appeals on Facebook
Are women congressional candidates on Facebook disproportionately punished for using negative emotions? Scholars suggest the success of negative language used by campaigns is patterned by gender, but it is less clear whether women politicians are able to grow support on a digital platform where negativity spurs engagement. In this research note, we consider the relationship between candidate gender, negative appeals, and user engagement on Facebo…
The partisan context of parliamentary questions: A study of opposition behavior in the danish parliament
This paper investigates MPs’ questions in Denmark. The paper focuses on the role of the “partisan context” for their questioning behavior. This refers to three aspects. First, the status of the party in terms of government versus opposition. Second, it refers to the issues a party finds important to focus on, as measured by its party manifesto. Third, it refers to the role of individual MPs within the party, most importantly the issues to which t…
Sit Still, Talk Pretty: Partisan Differences Among Women Candidates’ Campaign Appeals
Women running for Congress make different choices from men about how to connect with constituents on social media, and the increasing number of women running for Congress from both parties suggests that further assessment of the gendered patterns of emotional appeals is needed. We use this opportunity to assess the joint influence of gender and partisanship on patterns of emotional appeals, showing how party moderates the distinct appeals women c…
Pandemic Messaging: Congressional Communication and the Mechanisms of Polarizing Rhetoric
U.S. senators are increasingly turning to Twitter to stoke partisan divisions, and it's not just what they say, but rather how they say it. Senators spent the Spring of 2020 responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the tone and framing used to engage a digital constituency was largely dependent on partisan alignment with President Trump. We use senators' Twitter activity during the outbreak to offer new insight into the mechanisms of lawmakers' p…
Negative Sentiment and Congressional Cue-Taking on Social Media
Congressional candidates regularly turn their frustration into posts on Facebook, fueling extreme partisanship and “echo-chamber” dialogue with their negative sentiment. In this research, we provide new evidence demonstrating the power of that negative sentiment to elicit more user engagement on Facebook across various metrics, illustrating how congressional candidates’ use of negativity corresponds with greater negativity in public responses. To…
The Ubiquitous President: Presidential Communication and Digital Democracy in Tumultuous Times
In the wake of the Donald Trump presidency, political communication scholars have faced the persistent question of how to explain presidential communication in an era of rapid response in 240-characters or less. Fortunately for those of us still trying to answer this omnipresent question, The Ubiquitous Presidency, offers a lifeline by presenting a clear and effective framework for understanding presidential communications in a digital world wher…
Good and pissed: Gendered emotional appeals on Twitter
Persistent gender stereotypes portray women as pleasant and polite, but in the wake of the #MeToo movement and polarized politics, female candidates are turning to Twitter and they aren’t hiding their frustration. Congressional candidates use Twitter to connect with voters, but political stalemates over health care, reproductive rights, and pay equity are the fodder for female candidates’ emotionally charged rhetoric on Twitter. Women are running…
Different Chambers, Divergent Rhetoric: Institutional Differences and Policy Representation on Social Media
For the past decade, members of both the House and Senate have increasingly used Twitter to curate a political agenda, but some are better equipped to drive digital policy conversations—even on a public platform with few constraints, low costs, and outsized user discretion. This research note explores the variable digital representation between congressional chambers, using tweets from the 115th Congress to illustrate asymmetric patterns in lawma…
Conditional Presidential Priorities: Audience-Driven Agenda Setting
The president’s agenda-setting ability has a rich research history, with studies most often derived from the State of the Union Address. While a president communicates many of his policy priorities via the public address, the presidential agenda is more complex and variable than can be understood in one speech. Presidents have a number of tools to articulate their priorities, and how we understand presidential agenda-setting is linked to the tool…
What Drives U.S. Congressional Members’ Policy Attention on Twitter
Social media platforms like Twitter enable policymakers to communicate their policy preferences directly and provide a bird's‐eye view of their diverse policy agendas. In this article, we leverage politicians’ social media data to study political attention using a supervised machine‐learning classifier that detects policy areas in individual tweets. We examine how individual diversity and institutional factors affect differential attention to pub…
The influence of policy and context on teachers’ social media use
Research on teachers’ use of social media has typically assumed that it is a) driven by a need for professional learning and b) best understood in terms of individual motivations. In this study, we use a dataset of nearly 600,000 tweets posted to one or more of 48 Regional Educational Twitter Hashtags associated with 44 U.S. states. To explore the influence of local contextual factors on hashtag‐ and account‐level activity in these hashtags, we u…
Constituent connections: Senators’ reputation building in the age of social media
Twitter is changing strategic messaging in the U.S. Senate. Senators are using Twitter to frame their political brand for constituents, fostering a new digital dialog with constituents. I propose a constituent-driven theory of strategic messaging where senators curate a reputation on Twitter that matches their perceived expectations of their primary constituency. Representation on social media challenges what we know about senators’ institutional…
Senate Representation on Twitter: National Policy Reputations for Constituent Communication
Objective American politics has become more nationalized, and this trend is buoyed by senators’ social media patterns that incentivize connections with an expansive digital constituency. This article examines how U.S. senators reflect and perpetuate this trend of national policy priorities with their constituent communication on Twitter. Methods I investigate how senators reflect and perpetuate this era of national policy priorities by using a tw…
U.S. Senators on Twitter: Asymmetric Party Rhetoric in 140 Characters
The U.S. Senate is a party-polarized institution where divisive political rhetoric stems from the partisan divide. Senators regularly chastise political opponents, but not all senators are equally critical. Research finds that elite party polarization is asymmetrical with greater divergence by Republicans, so I expect Republican senators to mimic that trend with higher levels of partisan rhetoric. To assess the variance in partisan rhetoric, I ca…
Minority Opposition and Asymmetric Parties? Senators’ Partisan Rhetoric on Twitter
Hyper-partisanship in Congress extends from the legislative process into lawmakers’ strategic communications, but some partisans are leaning into the political rhetoric. Previous research offers competing explanations for this partisan rhetoric—one ascribed to Republicans’ asymmetric record of heightened partisan politics and another to minority party status within Congress. I investigate these different explanations in the context of congression…
New Avenues for the Study of Agenda Setting
Existing literature on the agenda‐setting process is grounded and well cited in studies of U.S. national institutions, but emerging scholarship has taken the fundamental principles of agenda setting—attention, information, and learning—and has extended their applicability to understudied participants and institutions. This essay highlights three areas of study that have undergone particular growth during the last few years and best represent the …
Senate Representation on Twitter: National Policy Reputations for Constituent Communication
Objective American politics has become more nationalized, and this trend is buoyed by senators’ social media patterns that incentivize connections with an expansive digital constituency. This article examines how U.S. senators reflect and perpetuate this trend of national policy priorities with their constituent communication on Twitter. Methods I investigate how senators reflect and perpetuate this era of national policy priorities by using a tw…
The Politics of Prioritization: Senators’ Attention in 140 Characters
For decades US senators have maximized their limited resources to juggle policy, party politics, and constituents, but the rise of social media sheds new light on how they make these strategic choices. David Mayhew’s seminal study of Congress (1974) argues that lawmakers engage in three types of activities – credit claiming, advertising, and position taking, but equally important is understanding how lawmakers make strategic choices among these a…
Conditional Presidential Priorities: Audience-Driven Agenda Setting
The president’s agenda-setting ability has a rich research history, with studies most often derived from the State of the Union Address. While a president communicates many of his policy priorities via the public address, the presidential agenda is more complex and variable than can be understood in one speech. Presidents have a number of tools to articulate their priorities, and how we understand presidential agenda-setting is linked to the tool…
Gendered Priorities? Policy Communication in the U.S. Senate
Women running for Congress make different choices than men about how to connect with constituents on social media, but few studies investigate how these variable strategies shape in-office messaging, particularly those of U.S. senators. This article extends research on gendered congressional communication by looking at how women in the Senate build reputations on Twitter, specifically assessing whether they set themselves apart with the policy ag…
Negative Sentiment and Congressional Cue-Taking on Social Media
Congressional candidates regularly turn their frustration into posts on Facebook, fueling extreme partisanship and “echo-chamber” dialogue with their negative sentiment. In this research, we provide new evidence demonstrating the power of that negative sentiment to elicit more user engagement on Facebook across various metrics, illustrating how congressional candidates’ use of negativity corresponds with greater negativity in public responses. To…
From rhetoric to record: Linking Tweets to Legislative Agendas in Congress
Social media incentivizes members of Congress to routinely advertise their policy agenda for the public; however, it is unclear whether those expressed policy priorities are linked to their legislative behaviour. The incongruous nature of unlimited, online messages with constrained policy agendas necessitates assessing the association between what politicians say and their institutional actions. Using a dataset of senators' tweets from the 114th …
All Talk, No Action? Politicians’ Agenda Responsiveness to Citizens’ Engagement on Social Media
Studies have shown that citizens’ engagement on social media drives politicians to adapt the issues they discuss online. However, for representative democracy to function effectively, politicians must not only discuss these issues but also act on them. This paper explores whether higher citizens’ engagement on social media shapes the issues politicians address online and leads to substantive agenda responsiveness, such as proposing legislation or…
Constrained Communication and Negativity Bias: Gendered Emotional Appeals on Facebook
Are women congressional candidates on Facebook disproportionately punished for using negative emotions? Scholars suggest the success of negative language used by campaigns is patterned by gender, but it is less clear whether women politicians are able to grow support on a digital platform where negativity spurs engagement. In this research note, we consider the relationship between candidate gender, negative appeals, and user engagement on Facebo…
The partisan context of parliamentary questions: A study of opposition behavior in the danish parliament
This paper investigates MPs’ questions in Denmark. The paper focuses on the role of the “partisan context” for their questioning behavior. This refers to three aspects. First, the status of the party in terms of government versus opposition. Second, it refers to the issues a party finds important to focus on, as measured by its party manifesto. Third, it refers to the role of individual MPs within the party, most importantly the issues to which t…
Gendered Agenda-Building: How Female Candidates Communicate Heterogeneous Issue Agendas
This study investigates the extent to which the issues emphasized by female political candidates in American congressional elections vary based on the media platforms used to promote their messages. We develop a framework of gendered agenda-building, arguing that the pressures women face on the campaign trail are rooted in gender stereotypes and will lead women to curate more heterogeneous issue agendas compared to their male counterparts. Our fr…
Pandemic Messaging: Congressional Communication and the Mechanisms of Polarizing Rhetoric
U.S. senators are increasingly turning to Twitter to stoke partisan divisions, and it's not just what they say, but rather how they say it. Senators spent the Spring of 2020 responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the tone and framing used to engage a digital constituency was largely dependent on partisan alignment with President Trump. We use senators' Twitter activity during the outbreak to offer new insight into the mechanisms of lawmakers' p…
Good and pissed: Gendered emotional appeals on Twitter
Persistent gender stereotypes portray women as pleasant and polite, but in the wake of the #MeToo movement and polarized politics, female candidates are turning to Twitter and they aren’t hiding their frustration. Congressional candidates use Twitter to connect with voters, but political stalemates over health care, reproductive rights, and pay equity are the fodder for female candidates’ emotionally charged rhetoric on Twitter. Women are running…
Redefining “expansion” in congressional communication: Homestyles for a digital constituency
Self‐presentation in Congress is more nationalized, with digital constituencies on platforms such as Twitter offering new reputation‐building opportunities. Digital constituencies transform traditional expectations of constituent communication, challenging Richard Fenno's theory that representatives adopt an “expansionist” style with constituents during early, vulnerable phases of their tenure. In a digital era that encourages a more national app…
Rapid response and uncertain agendas: Senators' response to Dobbs
We examine policymakers' nuanced strategies of digital agenda setting during times of lawmaker uncertainty versus anticipated policy communication. Whereas existing agenda‐setting studies tend to focus on how policymakers allocate attention to preferred policies, we explain how policymakers react to an issue in a digital media climate where the expectation is engagement. We explore the dynamics of digital agenda setting with U.S. senators' Twitte…
Different Chambers, Divergent Rhetoric: Institutional Differences and Policy Representation on Social Media
For the past decade, members of both the House and Senate have increasingly used Twitter to curate a political agenda, but some are better equipped to drive digital policy conversations—even on a public platform with few constraints, low costs, and outsized user discretion. This research note explores the variable digital representation between congressional chambers, using tweets from the 115th Congress to illustrate asymmetric patterns in lawma…
Deepening the concept of ‘compelling arguments: Linking substantive and affective dimensions of attributes in assessing the effects of climate change news on public opinion
This study examines the effects of both the substantive and affective dimensions of issue attributes in the news coverage of climate change on the public’s perception of the importance of this environmental issue. Results from our analysis show that the four affective dimensions (e.g., positive and negative emotions, anger, and sadness) of the three attributes (e.g., existence, effects, and solutions) exerted strong influence on public issue prio…
Tweeting for Hearts and Minds? Measuring Candidates’ Use of Anxiety in Tweets During the 2018 Midterm Elections
This article considers whether candidates strategically use emotional rhetoric in social media messages similar to the way that fear appeals are used strategically in televised campaign advertisements. We use a dataset of tweets issued by the campaign accounts of candidates for the US House of Representatives during the last two months of the 2018 midterm elections to determine whether candidate vulnerability predicts the presence of certain emot…
Information is cheap, but filtering is costly: Congressional investment in reference resources
Lawmakers who can supply themself with information to manage complex problems are at an advantage, but equally important is the filtering and contextualizing of applicable information. Members of Congress manage a deluge of policy and political information, and this short paper examines one strategy members of Congress use to mitigate that burden—by investing in reference material and news media to filter and summarize the policymaking environmen…
Research Note: Comparing Traditional Presidential Rhetoric: Trump Versus Biden
Even though they both held the same office, Donald Trump and Joe Biden could not have presented themselves more differently. Biden presented himself as the restorer of tradition after Trump was the disruptor. In this research note, we examine seven sets of speeches that hold constant either the timing or the setting to see if their rhetoric contrasted as much as the way they presented themselves. We find that the words and emotions that they invo…
Sit Still, Talk Pretty: Partisan Differences Among Women Candidates’ Campaign Appeals
Women running for Congress make different choices from men about how to connect with constituents on social media, and the increasing number of women running for Congress from both parties suggests that further assessment of the gendered patterns of emotional appeals is needed. We use this opportunity to assess the joint influence of gender and partisanship on patterns of emotional appeals, showing how party moderates the distinct appeals women c…
Constituent connections: Senators’ reputation building in the age of social media
Twitter is changing strategic messaging in the U.S. Senate. Senators are using Twitter to frame their political brand for constituents, fostering a new digital dialog with constituents. I propose a constituent-driven theory of strategic messaging where senators curate a reputation on Twitter that matches their perceived expectations of their primary constituency. Representation on social media challenges what we know about senators’ institutional…
What’s in a name: Policy and Media agenda setting
Preview this article: What’s in a name?, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/asj.20013.rus-1.gif
New Avenues for the Study of Agenda Setting
Existing literature on the agenda‐setting process is grounded and well cited in studies of U.S. national institutions, but emerging scholarship has taken the fundamental principles of agenda setting—attention, information, and learning—and has extended their applicability to understudied participants and institutions. This essay highlights three areas of study that have undergone particular growth during the last few years and best represent the …
U.S. Senators on Twitter: Asymmetric Party Rhetoric in 140 Characters
The U.S. Senate is a party-polarized institution where divisive political rhetoric stems from the partisan divide. Senators regularly chastise political opponents, but not all senators are equally critical. Research finds that elite party polarization is asymmetrical with greater divergence by Republicans, so I expect Republican senators to mimic that trend with higher levels of partisan rhetoric. To assess the variance in partisan rhetoric, I ca…
The Politics of Prioritization: Senators’ Attention in 140 Characters
For decades US senators have maximized their limited resources to juggle policy, party politics, and constituents, but the rise of social media sheds new light on how they make these strategic choices. David Mayhew’s seminal study of Congress (1974) argues that lawmakers engage in three types of activities – credit claiming, advertising, and position taking, but equally important is understanding how lawmakers make strategic choices among these a…
Deepening the concept of ‘compelling arguments: Linking substantive and affective dimensions of attributes in assessing the effects of climate change news on public opinion
This study examines the effects of both the substantive and affective dimensions of issue attributes in the news coverage of climate change on the public’s perception of the importance of this environmental issue. Results from our analysis show that the four affective dimensions (e.g., positive and negative emotions, anger, and sadness) of the three attributes (e.g., existence, effects, and solutions) exerted strong influence on public issue prio…
Tweeting for Hearts and Minds? Measuring Candidates’ Use of Anxiety in Tweets During the 2018 Midterm Elections
This article considers whether candidates strategically use emotional rhetoric in social media messages similar to the way that fear appeals are used strategically in televised campaign advertisements. We use a dataset of tweets issued by the campaign accounts of candidates for the US House of Representatives during the last two months of the 2018 midterm elections to determine whether candidate vulnerability predicts the presence of certain emot…
What Drives U.S. Congressional Members’ Policy Attention on Twitter
Social media platforms like Twitter enable policymakers to communicate their policy preferences directly and provide a bird's‐eye view of their diverse policy agendas. In this article, we leverage politicians’ social media data to study political attention using a supervised machine‐learning classifier that detects policy areas in individual tweets. We examine how individual diversity and institutional factors affect differential attention to pub…
The influence of policy and context on teachers’ social media use
Research on teachers’ use of social media has typically assumed that it is a) driven by a need for professional learning and b) best understood in terms of individual motivations. In this study, we use a dataset of nearly 600,000 tweets posted to one or more of 48 Regional Educational Twitter Hashtags associated with 44 U.S. states. To explore the influence of local contextual factors on hashtag‐ and account‐level activity in these hashtags, we u…
Constituent connections: Senators’ reputation building in the age of social media
Twitter is changing strategic messaging in the U.S. Senate. Senators are using Twitter to frame their political brand for constituents, fostering a new digital dialog with constituents. I propose a constituent-driven theory of strategic messaging where senators curate a reputation on Twitter that matches their perceived expectations of their primary constituency. Representation on social media challenges what we know about senators’ institutional…
Senate Representation on Twitter: National Policy Reputations for Constituent Communication
Objective American politics has become more nationalized, and this trend is buoyed by senators’ social media patterns that incentivize connections with an expansive digital constituency. This article examines how U.S. senators reflect and perpetuate this trend of national policy priorities with their constituent communication on Twitter. Methods I investigate how senators reflect and perpetuate this era of national policy priorities by using a tw…
Gendered Priorities? Policy Communication in the U.S. Senate
Women running for Congress make different choices than men about how to connect with constituents on social media, but few studies investigate how these variable strategies shape in-office messaging, particularly those of U.S. senators. This article extends research on gendered congressional communication by looking at how women in the Senate build reputations on Twitter, specifically assessing whether they set themselves apart with the policy ag…
Minority Opposition and Asymmetric Parties? Senators’ Partisan Rhetoric on Twitter
Hyper-partisanship in Congress extends from the legislative process into lawmakers’ strategic communications, but some partisans are leaning into the political rhetoric. Previous research offers competing explanations for this partisan rhetoric—one ascribed to Republicans’ asymmetric record of heightened partisan politics and another to minority party status within Congress. I investigate these different explanations in the context of congression…
From rhetoric to record: Linking Tweets to Legislative Agendas in Congress
Social media incentivizes members of Congress to routinely advertise their policy agenda for the public; however, it is unclear whether those expressed policy priorities are linked to their legislative behaviour. The incongruous nature of unlimited, online messages with constrained policy agendas necessitates assessing the association between what politicians say and their institutional actions. Using a dataset of senators' tweets from the 114th …
What’s in a name: Policy and Media agenda setting
Preview this article: What’s in a name?, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/asj.20013.rus-1.gif
The Ubiquitous President: Presidential Communication and Digital Democracy in Tumultuous Times
In the wake of the Donald Trump presidency, political communication scholars have faced the persistent question of how to explain presidential communication in an era of rapid response in 240-characters or less. Fortunately for those of us still trying to answer this omnipresent question, The Ubiquitous Presidency, offers a lifeline by presenting a clear and effective framework for understanding presidential communications in a digital world wher…
Good and pissed: Gendered emotional appeals on Twitter
Persistent gender stereotypes portray women as pleasant and polite, but in the wake of the #MeToo movement and polarized politics, female candidates are turning to Twitter and they aren’t hiding their frustration. Congressional candidates use Twitter to connect with voters, but political stalemates over health care, reproductive rights, and pay equity are the fodder for female candidates’ emotionally charged rhetoric on Twitter. Women are running…
Different Chambers, Divergent Rhetoric: Institutional Differences and Policy Representation on Social Media
For the past decade, members of both the House and Senate have increasingly used Twitter to curate a political agenda, but some are better equipped to drive digital policy conversations—even on a public platform with few constraints, low costs, and outsized user discretion. This research note explores the variable digital representation between congressional chambers, using tweets from the 115th Congress to illustrate asymmetric patterns in lawma…
Conditional Presidential Priorities: Audience-Driven Agenda Setting
The president’s agenda-setting ability has a rich research history, with studies most often derived from the State of the Union Address. While a president communicates many of his policy priorities via the public address, the presidential agenda is more complex and variable than can be understood in one speech. Presidents have a number of tools to articulate their priorities, and how we understand presidential agenda-setting is linked to the tool…
The partisan context of parliamentary questions: A study of opposition behavior in the danish parliament
This paper investigates MPs’ questions in Denmark. The paper focuses on the role of the “partisan context” for their questioning behavior. This refers to three aspects. First, the status of the party in terms of government versus opposition. Second, it refers to the issues a party finds important to focus on, as measured by its party manifesto. Third, it refers to the role of individual MPs within the party, most importantly the issues to which t…
Sit Still, Talk Pretty: Partisan Differences Among Women Candidates’ Campaign Appeals
Women running for Congress make different choices from men about how to connect with constituents on social media, and the increasing number of women running for Congress from both parties suggests that further assessment of the gendered patterns of emotional appeals is needed. We use this opportunity to assess the joint influence of gender and partisanship on patterns of emotional appeals, showing how party moderates the distinct appeals women c…
Pandemic Messaging: Congressional Communication and the Mechanisms of Polarizing Rhetoric
U.S. senators are increasingly turning to Twitter to stoke partisan divisions, and it's not just what they say, but rather how they say it. Senators spent the Spring of 2020 responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the tone and framing used to engage a digital constituency was largely dependent on partisan alignment with President Trump. We use senators' Twitter activity during the outbreak to offer new insight into the mechanisms of lawmakers' p…
Negative Sentiment and Congressional Cue-Taking on Social Media
Congressional candidates regularly turn their frustration into posts on Facebook, fueling extreme partisanship and “echo-chamber” dialogue with their negative sentiment. In this research, we provide new evidence demonstrating the power of that negative sentiment to elicit more user engagement on Facebook across various metrics, illustrating how congressional candidates’ use of negativity corresponds with greater negativity in public responses. To…
Gendered Agenda-Building: How Female Candidates Communicate Heterogeneous Issue Agendas
This study investigates the extent to which the issues emphasized by female political candidates in American congressional elections vary based on the media platforms used to promote their messages. We develop a framework of gendered agenda-building, arguing that the pressures women face on the campaign trail are rooted in gender stereotypes and will lead women to curate more heterogeneous issue agendas compared to their male counterparts. Our fr…
Not ready to make nice: Congressional candidates’ emotional appeals on Twitter
Objective Congressional candidates use digital platforms to bolster and define their political reputation, and political stalemates over inflation, reproductive rights, and the lasting impact of Trump politics are fueling candidates’ emotionally charged rhetoric on Twitter, especially for women. Against the backdrop of President Donald Trump's presidency and the #MeToo movement, previous research has shown that women running for Congress are lead…
Rapid response and uncertain agendas: Senators' response to Dobbs
We examine policymakers' nuanced strategies of digital agenda setting during times of lawmaker uncertainty versus anticipated policy communication. Whereas existing agenda‐setting studies tend to focus on how policymakers allocate attention to preferred policies, we explain how policymakers react to an issue in a digital media climate where the expectation is engagement. We explore the dynamics of digital agenda setting with U.S. senators' Twitte…
Research Note: Comparing Traditional Presidential Rhetoric: Trump Versus Biden
Even though they both held the same office, Donald Trump and Joe Biden could not have presented themselves more differently. Biden presented himself as the restorer of tradition after Trump was the disruptor. In this research note, we examine seven sets of speeches that hold constant either the timing or the setting to see if their rhetoric contrasted as much as the way they presented themselves. We find that the words and emotions that they invo…
Political science (29 works) · Law (23 works) · Social Media and Politics (23 works) · Politics (22 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (21 works) · Public relations (19 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Law (16 works) · Social media (14 works) · Public Administration (13 works)