Book reviews

AUSTRALIA IN PEACE AND WAR: EXTERNAL RELATIONS 1788–1977, T.B. Millar, ANU Press, Canberra, 1978, 578 pp.

CHINA AND AMERICA: THE SEARCH FOR A NEW RELATIONSHIP, William Barnds, ed., New York University Press, New York, 1977. $15.00 cloth.

CHINA AND THE WORLD SINCE 1949, Wang Gungwu, The Macmillan Company of Australia, December 1977, $17.50 bound, $8.75 paper.

THE DIPLOMACY OF DETENTE: THE KISSINGER ERA, Coral Bell, Martin Robinson, London, 1977, pp. 278.

THE PROBLEM OF CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL WARFARE, Volume IV: CB DISARMAMENT NEGOTIATIONS, 1920–1970, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Almquist and Wiksell International, Stockholm, 1971.

CHEMICAL DISARMAMENT: NEW WEAPONS FOR OLD, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Almquist and Wiksell International, Stockholm, 1975.

DELAYED TOXIC EFFECTS OF CHEMICAL WARFARE AGENTS, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Almquist and Wiksell International, Stockholm, 1975.

ECOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCE OF THE SECOND INDOCHINA WAR, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Almquist and Wiksell International, Stockholm, 1976.     

Review

Book reviewed in this article: Al-Kuwait: Dirasa fi aliyat al-dawla al-qutriyah wal-sultah wal-mujtama', Shafiq Ghabra Min tada'iyat ihtilal al-Kuwait, Shafiq Ghabra     

War and Diplomacy in the Middle East

Book reviewed in this article: The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War and Peace, 1989–1992, James A. Baker, III, with Thomas M. DeFrank The Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait: Saddam Hussein, his state and International Power Politics, Mussallam Ali Musallam     

The public-facing policy agenda of state legislatures: The communication of public policy via twitter

How political actors choose which politics to focus on helps shape the outcome of the policy process. While the policy agenda of the federal government has received widespread attention, there is much less known about the policy agendas of the U.S. states. In this paper, we describe how and why states choose to have similar agendas. We rely on the Twitter activity of every state legislator in America to measure the attention that states pay to the categories developed in the Policy Agenda Project (PAP). We develop machine learning tools to measure the proportion of tweets from every state legislature from 2017 in each of the PAP policy topics. Our results show that states that the public-facing policy agenda of a state legislature is correlated with the level of legislative professionalism and the partisan and ideological politics of the state. These results further our understanding of state policymaking and agenda setting.