Zayne Sember

Abstract: When do legislators respond to their constituencies? In this three-paper dissertation I use the public communications of legislators to investigate how changes in the constituency and the country motivate members of Congress to adapt how they present themselves to the public. In the first paper, I pair congressional press release and Census data to measure the effect of changes in constituency demographics on what legislators talk about, finding some evidence that legislators adapt their communications in response to changes in electoral safety and the size of certain demographic groups in their constituency. In the second paper, I leverage the COVID-19 pandemic to test for legislators’ responsiveness to local and national conditions in their social media posts cross-sectionally and longitudinally, finding mixed evidence of responsiveness to constituency conditions. In the third paper, I consider how the nationalization of on and offline media impacts legislators’ attention to local and national topics in their social media posts and press releases. Together, these studies contribute to literatures concerning legislator responsiveness and political communication by moving beyond traditional methods of measuring legislators’ activities in favor of using the text as data methods to measure how legislators present themselves to the public and represent their constituents.