How is Partisanship Influencing the Nationalization of U.S. Governor's Policy Agendas?
P6-S153-1
Presented by: Dan Butler
Co-partisan governors increasingly pursue similar policies, and policy outcomes at the state level tend to follow from partisan control of government. Researchers have attribute this pattern to elites pursuing partisan goals to the exclusion of voter opinion in their state. However, we argue that there are still reasons for U.S. governors to be mindful of voters' preferences and to take steps to appeal to them when they lay out their policy agendas. We study U.S. governor's agendas as given in their state of the state (SOTS) address between 1960 and 2024 to classify whether each sentence in the SOTS is more like the other SOTS given by the Republican governors or the Democratic governors that year. We then aggregate the sentence level measures to get a score at the speech level for how partisan each speech is. Consistent with recent research we find evidence that elite partisanship predicts what governors focus on in their speeches. However, we also find that voter partisanship also predicts the content of those speeches. Voters' partisan leanings continue to be an important part of what politicians prioritize in their public agendas.
Keywords: U.S. Politics, executive politics, public policy agendas