Climate Change in the State Executive Agenda

ABSTRACT State of the state (SOTS) speeches represent an annual opportunity for governors to identify issues they intend to prioritize in the coming year. The speeches represent a finite agenda space directed at lawmakers as well as the general public. In this paper, we use SOTS speeches to assess the attention American governors directed toward climate change from 2020 to 2024. Climate change is a particularly useful topic to explore substantively because of the outsized role states play in climate policy in the United States. We address three research questions. (1) What role does gubernatorial party have in determining the agenda presence of climate change? (2) What is the influence of legislative control versus divided government on climate agenda presence? (3) To what extent is climate change associated with other issues in SOTS speeches? Our dataset contains 60,801 manually coded quasi‐sentences from 235 speeches. We find that Democrats mention climate change more than Republicans, that this difference is greatest between government trifectas, but that Democratic and Republican governors speaking to divided legislatures shape their message to meet the partisan split. We also find that climate change is associated with a host of other issues, but that Democratic governors associate climate change with a broader range of issues than Republicans. Our work contributes to gubernatorial politics, climate politics, and agenda‐setting scholarship.