Congratulations to Ph.D. alum Ishita Gopal for winning the Raymond E. Lombra and Roberta Lombra Outstanding Graduate Research Award for her work as lead author of “The National Network of U.S. State Legislators on Twitter” in Political Science Research and Methods. In the paper, the authors we present a study of a national-scale information and communication network of state-level lawmakers in the U.S. In the study of state politics and policymaking, there is a decades-old literature on the spread of policies across the states. However, this literature contains very little in terms of observations of direct connections between policymakers who do not work in the same state. In this first-of-its-kind analysis, Dr. Gopal and her coauthors study the network of U.S. state lawmakers on Twitter. They find that there are robust and extensive ties among lawmakers that cross state boundaries and study how the attributes of lawmakers shape their online networks. Their research demonstrates that legislators tend to tie with others that are in the same political party, and have the same race and gender identities.
