Who do the members of the New York State Legislature follow on Twitter? Check out our findings and jump to the data.

The MA Forecasting Tournament is live and here are the first results. Join before the primaries are announced for a better chance at winning.

Political risk can be a frustrating and fragmented industry to work in. Legislata is seeking to make that better. Here’s how to get started.

Who do the members of the New York City Council follow on Twitter? Check out our findings and jump to the data.

Who does the members of the Rhode Island General Assembly follow on Twitter? Check out our findings and jump to the data here.

The MA Forecasting Tournament is live! Read how to play and win prize money for knowing what will happen in the Commonwealth’s politics.

Here’s how to use our two Massachusetts workspaces to keep up with political developments in the Bay State.

If you meet a group of political professionals, there is a good chance that someone is at that moment scrolling through Twitter. But it isn’t simply because they’re addicted to social media (though they might be).

However, acting as a de facto wire service while letting us also do our work is not something that traditional social media was designed to provide – leaving us all scrolling endlessly through noise looking for the signal we need.

With tagging in Legislata, you can more easily find what you need and stay up to date without spending all day on social media.

Budget Week saw 1,521 amendments filed on the MA House of Representatives’ budget proposal. What can an analysis of those amendments tell us about politics on Beacon Hill?

We’re piloting a new semi-automated bill tracking and information service for the Massachusetts State Legislature. Here’s how to use it.

All startups have an origin story, that eureka moment that clarified a problem and spurred the founders to build the solution. Here’s ours.

Facebook has become a ubiquitous communications platform for many elected officials - perhaps the top way they get their message out. However, most study of Facebook activity is on politicians’ posts and the reactions to them. There is another aspect of Facebook that is sitting there unexamined: politicians following others. 

Politics is about people. Working in politics is about working with lots and lots of people, remembering who is who, and communicating that with everyone on your team. It’s a lot of information and can be difficult to manage.

Legislata can help you keep track of everyone you interact with through three key features of our productivity software: Automatic contact creation; Tagging; Office-wide posts.

Here are some tips for how to make the most of your contact database.

We’ve talked about managing interns, but what about managing your own boss? Managing a relationship with a person who has some power over your career can be tricky, so here are some tips for managing up more effectively. 

If you are a staffer in a city council or state legislature, you’re likely to work with community organizations. It may be that your boss has an initiative that requires participation from the nonprofit sector or that you’re planning an event that would benefit from others’ participation. 

Cultivating relationships with these groups is a crucial part to working in politics but can seem difficult if you’ve spoken with them before. We discussed how to best approach and work with a local organization with Kristen Halbert, political consultant and previously Civic Engagement Director for Boston City Councilor (and now Mayor) Michelle Wu. 

When Michelle Wu was elected Mayor of Boston, part of the coverage focused on her age. She is the youngest mayor among the United States’ 25 largest cities and at the forefront of Millennials who are gaining positions of prominence in elected office across the country.  There is one place in which a generational divide in how politics are practiced might be evident: the use of emojis on social media. Those who grew up typing : ) might be more likely to use emojis on Twitter and/or use them to reach out to younger voters. 

We created a quiz to see what political party from Germany, France, or the United Kingdom people would support based on their responses to American political questions. You can read more about it here and take the quiz yourself. At the end of the quiz, we asked people how they would identify themselves in American ideological terms. This gave us the chance to match how the parties align with with the American left-right spectrum. Here we have the breakdowns for the preliminary set of respondents.

Breaking into an industry can be difficult, especially when it’s one as opaque and relatively small as political staff work. There may only be a few dozen Congressional staffers from a state of millions and it can seem impossible to get one of those jobs when competing against the relatives of wealthy donors and well-connected insiders. However, it is definitely possible. Elected officials are always looking for good staff who can work hard and deliver for their constituents. Here are some tips to demystify the process and jumpstart your job search for state and national staffer positions.

News from the biggest countries in Europe often make it to the United States. But if parties from the United Kingdom, France, and Germany were competing for American votes, who would you support? And would that change how you read the news or think about how politics transfers from one national context to the next?

If you are a staffer in a city council or state legislature, you may be thinking about running for office yourself. Unlike those who throw their hat into the ring from outside active politics, or from another elected position, your current role has limitations that your opponents may not face. However, it’s also a launching point, with opportunities that can help you run your best possible campaign.