I am currently on the job market
Annelise Russell, Ph.D.
anneliserussell8892@gmail.com
Associate Professor
University of Kentucky
Year of PhD: 2018
Phone: 4058304357
Address: 417 Patterson Office Tower
City: Lexington, Kentucky - 40506
Country: United States
About Me:
I am an associate professor at the University of Kentucky Martin School of Public Policy studying congressional communication and policy communication. My research examines how lawmakers use social media and various communication tools for constituent engagement, campaigning, and representation. My research explores how members of Congress strategically adopt communication strategies on Twitter and Facebook to signal their political and policy priorities. My published work explains how lawmakers use social media to convey their agendas, examining how partisanship, gender, and institutional dynamics in Congress shape communication behaviors on Twitter and Facebook. I have published research across political science, public policy and communication, including in American Politics Research, Policy and Internet, Political Research Quarterly and Policy Studies Journal. Much of my interest in political communication stems from my work as journalist working for the National Journal,Congressional Quarterly, and the San Francisco Chronicle. I received a PhD in Government from the University of Texas at Austin, and also hold bachelor’s degrees in political science and journalism from the University of Oklahoma.
Research Interests
Legislative Politics
Political Communication
Congress Social Media
Social Media
Public Policy
U.S. Congress
Digital Media
Gender & Institutions
Policy Process
Political Rhetoric
Candidate Rhetoric
Campaign Communication
Partisanship And Polarization
Polarization
Party Politics
Twitter Politics
Communication
Congressional Communication
Congress
Partisan Media
Countries of Interest
United States
My Research:
The primary way people learn about American politics is through the media and political communication. Given this reliance, it is important to understand lawmakers’ rhetoric and communication that frames what people consume and how they consume it. My research interests include public policy and social media norms within U.S. institutions, specifically Congress, with an emphasis on how new media platforms and communication serve lawmaker interests. This interdisciplinary research across policy, Congress, and communication enables me to better understand lawmakers' strategic communication. Much of my research is on congressional decision-making and communication, including an active research agenda in the intersection of social media and partisan politics. My research is published across political science, public policy and communication, including in American Politics Research and Policy Studies Journal. Much of my interest in political communication stems from my work as journalist working for the National Journal,Congressional Quarterly, and the San Francisco Chronicle. I previously served as manager for the Policy Agendas Project, which collects and organizes data to track changes in the national policy agenda. I am currently a faculty fellow with the project.
Publications:
Journal Articles:
Women running for Congress make different choices from men about how to connect with constituents on social media, but fewer studies investigate how these variable strategies shape in-office messaging, particularly those of U.S. Senators. This article extends research on gendered congressional communication by looking at how women in the Senate build reputations on Twitter, specifically assessing whether they set themselves apart with the policy agendas they promote online. Senators take advantage of Twitter’s low-cost and user-driven messaging to cultivate a reputation with their legislative expertise, and this research shows that women are curating a more comprehensive and broad agenda than gender stereotypes would otherwise suggest. Senators’ legislative communication on Twitter reveals women on both sides of the aisle are expanding their policy agenda to reach beyond “female issues.” Women are often stereotyped as less policy-oriented and only capable in gender-specific policy areas, but women in the Senate are actively communicating about contested policy issues and articulating diverse agendas. By adopting a comprehensive policy agenda for their public image, women in the Senate are both meeting and defying expectations about the policy topics they are willing and ready to act on.
Objective American politics has become more nationalized, and this trend is buoyed by senators’ social media patterns that incentivize connections with an expansive digital constituency. This article examines how U.S. senators reflect and perpetuate this trend of national policy priorities with their constituent communication on Twitter. Methods I investigate how senators reflect and perpetuate this era of national policy priorities by using a two‐year data set of tweets to show how senators are using Twitter to articulate a robust policy agenda. Results Senators’ policy‐driven messaging is the dominant style of reputation building on Twitter. Senators are adopting digital styles of representation that prioritize policy, positioning themselves as legislative experts to emphasize salient policies rather than local concerns. Conclusion Senators are communicating a policy‐first style of representation that meets the expectations of cultivated policy coalitions, and Twitter offers a birds‐eye view of one source for the public's nationalized attention.
This article considers whether candidates strategically use emotional rhetoric in social media messages similar to the way that fear appeals are used strategically in televised campaign advertisements. We use a dataset of tweets issued by the campaign accounts of candidates for the US House of Representatives during the last two months of the 2018 midterm elections to determine whether candidate vulnerability predicts the presence of certain emotions in social media messages. Contrary to theoretical expectations, we find that vulnerability does not appear to inspire candidates to use more anxious language in their tweets. However, we do find evidence of a surprising relationship between sad rhetoric and vulnerability and that campaign context influences the use of other forms of negative rhetoric in tweets.
This study examines the effects of both the substantive and affective dimensions of issue attributes in the news coverage of climate change on the public’s perception of the importance of this environmental issue. Results from our analysis show that the four affective dimensions (e.g., positive and negative emotions, anger, and sadness) of the three attributes (e.g., existence, effects, and solutions) exerted strong influence on public issue priority. This study extends the concept of compelling arguments in agenda setting research by suggesting that compelling arguments effects are not solely dependent on substantive attributes. Their affective dimensions are influential, as well.
Hyper-partisanship in Congress extends from the legislative process into lawmakers’ strategic communications, but some partisans are leaning into the political rhetoric. Previous research offers competing explanations for this partisan rhetoric—one ascribed to Republicans’ asymmetric record of heightened partisan politics and another to minority party status within Congress. I investigate these different explanations in the context of congressional social media activity to examine how these competing theories of partisan rhetoric work when explicitly considering the use of partisan labels. I examine senators’ tweets over three Congresses and find support for an asymmetric model of partisan rhetoric; however, minority status relative to the White House and leadership roles bolster this effect. In addition, ideological extremism may explain senators’ willingness to use partisan communication to attack political opponents on social media. These findings expand the scope of existing theories of partisan communication and broadly speak to the intersection of power and party.
Social media platforms like Twitter enable policymakers to communicate their policy preferences directly and provide a bird's‐eye view of their diverse policy agendas. In this article, we leverage politicians’ social media data to study political attention using a supervised machine‐learning classifier that detects policy areas in individual tweets. We examine how individual diversity and institutional factors affect differential attention to public policy among members of the U.S. Congress. Our novel approach to measuring policy attention builds on work by the Comparative Agendas Project, in order to study members’ political attention in near real‐time and to uncover both intragroup and intergroup differences. Using this classifier, we labeled more than one million tweets and found statistically significant differences in both the level and distribution of attention between parties, chambers, and genders. However, these differences were small enough to suggest that other Congressional members’ characteristics are also at play. We explored institutional factors (e.g., committee assignment, caucus), partisan issue preferences (e.g., issue ownership), and the political environment (e.g., partisan issues, confirmations, etc.) that may help explain the patterns of political attention that appear in Congress's tweets.
For decades US senators have maximized their limited resources to juggle policy, party politics, and constituents, but the rise of social media sheds new light on how they make these strategic choices. David Mayhew’s seminal study of Congress (1974) argues that lawmakers engage in three types of activities – credit claiming, advertising, and position taking, but equally important is understanding how lawmakers make strategic choices among these activities. Senators’ limited resources and attention forces them to prioritize and make trade-offs among these activities, and new media platforms, like Twitter, offer a window into that decision-making process. This article examines what influences senators’ decisions to publicly communicate these activities on Twitter. By using senators’ daily Twitter activity in 2013 and 2015 as a measure of their individual agenda, I find that senators are most likely to prioritize position-taking activities. Women and committee leaders allocate the most attention to policy positions, but attention to policy may come at a cost. When senators do choose to prioritize policy through position taking, they often make trade-offs that lead to decreased attention to advertising and credit claiming. These activities and the choices among them not only have implications for lawmakers’ behavior in Congress, but also the type of representation and information constituents can expect from their elected leaders.
The U.S. Senate is a party-polarized institution where divisive political rhetoric stems from the partisan divide. Senators regularly chastise political opponents, but not all senators are equally critical. Research finds that elite party polarization is asymmetrical with greater divergence by Republicans, so I expect Republican senators to mimic that trend with higher levels of partisan rhetoric. To assess the variance in partisan rhetoric, I catalogue senators’ Twitter activity during the first 6 months of the 113th and 114th Congresses, and find that Republicans are more likely to name-call their Democratic opponents and to make expressions of intraparty loyalty, particularly when they are the minority party.
Existing literature on the agenda‐setting process is grounded and well cited in studies of U.S. national institutions, but emerging scholarship has taken the fundamental principles of agenda setting—attention, information, and learning—and has extended their applicability to understudied participants and institutions. This essay highlights three areas of study that have undergone particular growth during the last few years and best represent the trend of applying the well understood dynamics of agenda setting to a broader swath of participants in the policy process. We first examine how scholars have focused on agenda setting within U.S. state and local governments and the way these institutions balance their agenda‐setting needs internally, while still trying to be heard within a federal system. Second, we highlight policy scholars' contributions to create better definitions and measures of the relationship between the media and policy process. Finally, we explore the contributions to the broader agenda‐setting literature made by scholars examining non‐U.S. institutions. These three categories are but a part of the growing trend in the subfield to expand the scope of agenda‐setting research.
Media Appearances:
Radio Appearances:
Annelise Russell, who helped lead the Comparative Agendas Project, an international effort to systematically measure, compare, and research public policy across the globe, talks about what the project does, her own research, and a little politics.
Newspaper Quotes:
Kentucky political science professors join hundreds of others calling for Trump’s removal
Blog Posts:
While President Donald Trump has become well known for his use of Twitter to criticize Democrats and cajole Republicans, he is not the only politician to use that social media network to chastise their political opponents. In new research, Annelise Russell examines how US Senators use Twitter, finding that, even when they are in the majority, Senate Republicans are more likely than Democrats to use their tweets for partisan, political messages and to make negative attacks.
Will Donald Trump really build that wall? Here’s a new research tool for finding out which promises presidents keep
Twitter and Facebook are two ways in which lawmakers are able to convey their partisan priorities to their constituents and voters. In the Senate, this partisan bickering has been going on long before the Trump presidency.