Leadership in a Pandemic: State Legislator Constituent Outreach in Response to COVID-19

Abstract

This study builds on the existing literature by considering the extent to which minority legislators offer different forms of constituency outreach during times of emergency. This case study of state legislator constituent outreach during the COVID-19 pandemic uses an analysis of Facebook posts in 2020 to track how state legislators provided outreach and communicated resources to their constituents during a public health crisis. We ask, in times of emergency, do women and minority legislators offer unique attention toward the needs of those constituencies that they descriptively represent, or do urgent issues push these legislators to focus more broadly on general concerns expressed by their entire district? We argue that legislators’ social media activity during the COVID-19 pandemic offers an important measure of their practice of constituency outreach due to the nation’s reliance on virtual communication during this period. This study finds there to be important variation by partisanship, but within party, we find important differences depending on both the race and gender of the legislator. Democratic women of all races were those legislators most actively providing information and outreach related to COVID-19 to their constituents in 2020.