All (Mayoral) Politics is Local?

One of the defining characteristics of modern American politics is the degree to which democratic representation has become increasingly “nationalized,” or focused on national issues at the expense of local issues. In this paper, we examine the degree to which this nationalization phenomenon has affected U.S. mayors. We do so by evaluating the similarity in political speech on Twitter between mayors in the National Council of Mayors and Members of Congress. We find substantial differences in the topic and partisan content of mayoral speech, suggesting that the office of the mayor has not been subject to the trends of nationalized politics. However, we further show that the degree to which mayors engage in nationalized rhetoric is a function of the population size of the city over which they govern.

sinclair_mayors_nationalization.pdf