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: Introduction -- Rhetorical agendas : a new framework for Senate representation -- Communicating Congressional priorities in the digital age -- "Short, not-so-sweet, and to (some) point" : Senate Tweets in 2013 and 2015 -- Categorizing Senators' Tweets and styles of communication -- Putting policy first : building a reputation as a policy wonk -- All politics is local : senators prioritize constituent service -- Partisan agendas : two parties, two patterns of partisan rhetoric -- Prioritization and representation : a future for social media and agenda-setting.

ObjectiveAmerican 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.MethodsI investigate how senators reflect and perpetuate this era of national policy priorities by using a two‐year data set of tweets to show how senators are using Twitter to articulate a robust policy agenda.ResultsSenators' policy‐driven messaging is the dominant style of reputation building on Twitter. Senators are adopting digital styles of representation that prioritize policy, positioning themselves as legislative experts to emphasize salient policies rather than local concerns.ConclusionSenators are communicating a policy‐first style of representation that meets the expectations of cultivated policy coalitions, and Twitter offers a birds‐eye view of one source for the public's nationalized attention.

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 congressional social media activity to examine how these competing theories of partisan rhetoric work when explicitly considering the use of partisan labels. I examine senators' tweets over three Congresses and find support for an asymmetric model of partisan rhetoric; however, minority status relative to the White House and leadership roles bolster this effect. In addition, ideological extremism may explain senators' willingness to use partisan communication to attack political opponents on social media. These findings expand the scope of existing theories of partisan communication and broadly speak to the intersection of power and party.

AbstractFor 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 activities. Senators' limited resources and attention forces them to prioritize and make trade-offs among these activities, and new media platforms, like Twitter, offer a window into that decision-making process. This article examines what influences senators' decisions to publicly communicate these activities on Twitter. By using senators' daily Twitter activity in 2013 and 2015 as a measure of their individual agenda, I find that senators are most likely to prioritize position-taking activities. Women and committee leaders allocate the most attention to policy positions, but attention to policy may come at a cost. When senators do choose to prioritize policy through position taking, they often make trade-offs that lead to decreased attention to advertising and credit claiming. These activities and the choices among them not only have implications for lawmakers' behavior in Congress, but also the type of representation and information constituents can expect from their elected leaders.

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 catalogue senators' Twitter activity during the first 6 months of the 113th and 114th Congresses, and find that Republicans are more likely to name-call their Democratic opponents and to make expressions of intraparty loyalty, particularly when they are the minority party.

AbstractWe 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' Twitter activity in response to the unexpected document leak overturning Roe v. Wade and the anticipated, subsequent Supreme Court decision. Policymakers across the political spectrum quickly reacted to both events, capturing shared policy attention, yet did so with variable response times and differing frames for the issue. We argue that when the agenda rapidly contracts and issues become salient on Twitter, the uncertainty, time, and tenor of lawmakers' response tell us about their policy‐making priorities. Punctuated attention cycles churn fast in a digital climate, but even amid these quick, attention‐grabbing news cycles, the nuance of those moments and policy uncertainty suggest that rhetorical agendas differ when galvanizing events are anticipated. How policymakers convey their agenda when the media environment incentivizes lawmakers to respond regardless of issue prioritization is fundamental to understanding policy attention by lawmakers operating a digital media environment.

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 lawmakers' rhetorical agendas on Twitter and the role of policy for self-presentation. Senators tweet more frequently, more often about policy, and represent a more diverse agenda on the platform. In this note, we suggest senators' additional resources and incentives for policy expertise shape important differences in digital engagement, illustrating the prevailing importance of institutional nuance for understanding how lawmakers use Twitter to frame their political reputations.

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 and its intended audience. This research note illustrates the important variation in presidential agendas across venues by comparing the publicized agenda from the State of the Union with the policymaker-focused priorities conveyed in the annual Budget Message. Using the coding scheme of the U.S. Policy Agendas Project to assess presidential agenda setting over more than 35 years, we illustrate the audience-driven variability in presidents' agendas and highlight how the intended audience reveals presidents' strategic choices.

"From Crisis to Stasis: Media Dynamics and Issue Attention in the News" published on by Oxford University Press.

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 invoked were not nearly as systematically distinct from each other as we expected. We argue that this result demonstrates that the power of the presidency as an institution is sufficiently constraining that even the most unorthodox candidate's rhetoric mirrors that of a traditionalist. When we do uncover some distinctions between them, those that exist are, for the most part, consistent with our expectations.