In research published in the Journal of Politics, Butler and Sutherland use the State of the State (SOTS) Addresses Corpus to test whether governors’ policy agendas have become more nationalized since 1960. The authors compare the topics covered in SOTS speeches to each other and to the presidential State of the Union (SOTU) speeches to measure the degree of similarity in their topics.

While prior work shows that elections have become more nationalized, Butler and Sutherland show that state policy agendas have also become more similar over time, and that governors are covering more national issues. In 1960, governors universally covered an average of 3-4 of the same topics out of every 20 they addressed in their speech, while in 2016, 6-7 topics were covered universally, a two-fold increase in topical similarity. Similarly, the SOTS addresses have become more similar to the presidential SOTU address. In 1960, 1 out of 20 topics would be covered in both the SOTS and SOTU; in 2016, 4-5 of those topics would be covered in both the SOTS and SOTU, a nearly four-fold increase. These patterns were observed across all regions of the country and for both Republican and Democratic governors.

The data supporting this website were collected to publish the following paper (downloadable here):

Butler, Daniel M. and Sutherland, Joseph L. 2022. “Have State Policy Agendas Become More Nationalized?” Forthcoming in the Journal of Politics.

For the current release of text features, please see our Harvard Dataverse entry once the paper is published (the database is not released until the paper is published).