How Does Public Opinion Affect Climate Change Policies? Constructing Measures of Climate Change Public Concern and Testing Their Effects on Climate Policy Outputs

Recent work in digital politics has begun to explore the role of race and ethnicity in digital communications. This research, however, has not fully addressed how lawmakers interact with their Asian constituents and the broader minority population. We take up this task by analyzing over 3 million tweets posted by state legislators between 2020 and 2021, focusing on messages targeting Asian ethnic groups. We fine-tuned a large language on classification task by using our labelled data and detected 7,202 anti-racism speech and 2,536 racism speech among 25,102 tweets that target Asian ethnic groups specifically. Our findings show that anti-racism tweets are significantly influenced by legislators’ ideology, district ideology, and demographics. Specifically, conservative legislators are less likely to share anti-racism messages unless their districts have higher proportions of minority and Asian populations or are liberal-leaning. In contrast, while racist speech is influenced by both legislators’ ideology and district demographics, district composition does not moderate the effect of ideology. Our findings contribute to the understanding of how state lawmakers address Asian communities, in addition to shedding light on the rise in extreme speech from elected officials.