Is There Anybody Out There? The Effects of Legislators ’ Communication with their Constituents.

Are legislators responsive to their constituents in their public communication? To what extent are they able to shape voters ’ preferences, as expressed by the issues they discuss? We address this twofold question with an analysis of all tweets sent by U.S. Members of Congress and a random sample of their followers from January to August 2013. Using a Latent Dirichlet Allocation model, we extract topics that represent the diversity of issues that legislators and ordinary citizens discuss on this social networking site. Then, we exploit variation in the distribution of topics over time to test whether Members of Congress lead or follow their constituents in their selection of issues to discuss, employing a Granger-causality framework. We find that legislators are more responsive to politically interested constituents and co-partisans, An enduring question in the study of democratic polities is the level of responsiveness of government to the preferences of the public. In order for members of a legislature to be responsive to public preferences, they need to be paying attention to the policy views and preferences of the public. In this paper we examine whether or not they are doing that by examining whether the issues discussed