Tracking Legislators’ Expressed Policy Agendas in Real Time

By: Alexandra Siegel, David Laitin, Duncan Lawrence, Jeremy Weinstein, Jens Hainmueller

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We develop a real-time scalable method to analyze strategic communication by political actors on salient policy issues through their tweets. Using word embeddings and supervised machine learning models, we classify legislators’ tweets according to whether or not they reference policy issues as well as what positions they promote. This allows us to measure the microdynamics of elite communication with a high level of temporal granularity in a manner that is scalable across diverse issue areas and legislatures. As a proof of concept, here we use this method to track the multi-year evolution of positions that members of Congress express on immigration and climate change. Validation with issue-specific vote scores suggests that our method performs with a satisfactory level of accuracy and enables us to identify legislators whose online rhetoric differs substantively from their voting behavior. We also display the immigration analysis on an automatically updated publicly available interactive website, enabling researchers, journalists, and policy makers alike to explore legislators’ shifting rhetoric on immigration in real-time.
∗ We thank Justin Grimmer and members of the Immigration Policy Lab for helpful comments and suggestions; New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics for hosting our realtime data collection; and Steve Eglash for facilitating our access to Twitter’s Historical PowerTrack API. We recognize funding from NEO Philanthropy/Four Freedoms Fund. Funders had no role in the data collection, analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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