Communicating in Good Faith? Dynamics of the Christian Right Agenda

It is an article of faith that organized interests connect members to elected officials through synchronized communication channels. Rarely, if at all, have researchers had access to multiple channels to test this notion. We mine a trove of nearly 2,500 emails the Family Research Council (FRC) sent to list subscribers from 2007 to the present. Text tools allow us to depict the issue agenda flux of the FRC and how it may be linked to their public communication from the last five years of press releases, as well as how frequently lobbied bills are mentioned. Our findings support the conditional independence of communication channels in ways that appear to conform to the requisites of the different audiences: elected officials are likely mobilized by different signals than members are. We emphasize the flexibility organized interests have in
composing their communications, to the extent that different audiences are presented with considerably different agendas.