Graduate students Taegyoon Kim, Nitheesha Nakka, and Ishita Gopal, along with Professor Bruce Desmarais and coauthors, published a new article in Legislative Studies Quarterly on state legislators’ use of Twitter during the Covid-19 pandemic. They find that legislators’ attention to the pandemic strongly correlates with the number of cases in the legislator’s state, the national count of new deaths, and the number of pandemic-related public policies passed within the legislator’s state. Furthermore, their article concludes that the degree of responsiveness to pandemic indicators differs significantly across political parties, with Republicans exhibiting weaker responses, on average. The article is available here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/lsq.12367.
