Amid national gridlock on climate policy, state legislatures have become increasingly central to climate governance—yet we know little about how state legislators communicate climate issues online. Drawing on 6,177,988 social media posts from 6,353 legislators on Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) between 2020 and 2023, we fine-tune a large language model to classify climate-relevant content and stance. Among nearly 58,000 labeled posts between 2020 and 2021, 34,165 were supportive and 11,573 opposing, with clear variation across platforms.
How does public climate change concern and policy preferences affect climate policy outputs? Prevailing explanations regarding the adoption of climate change (mitigation) policies often focus on collective action, institutions, distributive politics, and policy diffusion. Despite being the focus of many studies on public policy in other issue areas, the role of public opinion on national climate policy has not been studied simply because of a lack of survey questions repeated consistently across years and countries.