Media and the state legislature: how state legislators use media tactics to achieve legislative goals

Despite a spate of research discussing the importance of media in national politics, as well as the importance of state legislatures, we know virtually nothing about how media and state legislatures work in tandem. Using a survey of state legislators in California, Georgia and Iowa, I ask a number of questions regarding this relationship. Among my findings, I conclude that state legislators do use media tactics for a variety of purposes, although traditional means of legislating still prevail. Next, moving from Susan Herbst's (1998) finding that state legislators often use media content as a surrogate for public opinion, I examine the ways in which state legislators consume media. Here, I find that they consume media from their district more often than media from other places. Certainly this has important implications for the changing nature of representation in the state legislature. Most importantly, I find most state legislators feel similarly about the usefulness of using media tactics, but they vary considerably in how often they use those tactics. This variation appears to be a result of the resources afforded the legislator, rather than personal or district factors. In the end, I make a number of suggestions for future research in this understudied, but vitally important area of study.