Although partisan politics tend be set aside during crisis, the timing of gubernatorial actions in response to COVID-19 is telling about how partisanship is shaping the way elected officials are reacting to this pandemic. Using an event history analysis, the authors find that Democratic governors responded to the White House’s attempts to downplay the severity of the pandemic by declaring emergencies in order to draw citizen attention to and to prepare for a public health crisis. On the other hand, Republican governors resisted doing so until Trump declared a national emergency on March 13; however, Republican reactions were conditional on the president’s job approval in their states. While the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed governments into uncharted territory, state governors appear to be following patterns of vertical partisan competition that mirror those of more conventional policy areas in recent years.

Does the partisanship of officeholders affect environmental outcomes? The popular perception is that Republicans are bad for the environment, but complicating factors like federalism may limit this outcome. Using a dataset that tracks toxic releases over 20 years, we examine how partisan control of executive and legislative branches at both state and federal levels affect environmental policy. Moving beyond the passage of policies or environmental program spending allows us to fully understand the impact of Republicans on the environment. In addition, we take into account structural complications that may shape the relationship between Republican control and environmental outcomes. We find that the conventional wisdom that Republicans are bad for the environment has some validity, but it is dependent on what offices Republican elected officials occupy. More specifically, Republicans significantly affect toxic chemical releases when occupying governorships and controlling Congress. Our conclusions provide further insight into understanding how partisanship affects environmental outcomes, including how partisanship composition across the federal system matters.

Usage of Twitter by politicians has become more prevalent in recent years, with a goal of influencing the electorate and public perception. We collect, explore, and analyze over 12 years of public Twitter interactions of U.S. senators and representatives. Using community detection algorithms on these interaction networks, and without considering the content of the tweets, we are able to infer the political affiliation of each member of Congress with up to 98.8% accuracy in the House and 94.1% accuracy in the Senate. In addition, we define two metrics that can determine the political ideology of members of Congress achieving a very high Spearman’s rank correlation of 0.86 with the existing DW-NOMINATE score from the field of political science. Finally, we expand our structural analysis to intra-party factions and found evidence that some factions act on Twitter more cohesively than others, suggesting an increasing risk of an echo chamber effect when promoting their political agenda.

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Why do cities spend scarce resources lobbying the federal government? The hierarchy of U.S. government provides various pathways for local representation. Nevertheless, cities regularly invest in paid representation. This presents a puzzle for American democracy. Why do cities lobby, and do they lobby strategically? We quantify for the first time the extent of this phenomenon and examine its determinants using new data on 498 cities across forty-five states from 1998 to 2008. We find that economic distress pushes cities to lobby, but does not impact expenditures. Cities in competitive congressional districts, and therefore crucial to national politics, spend more on lobbying.