A Frame of Mind: Using Statistical Models for Detection of Framing and Agenda Setting Campaigns

Abstract

Framing is a sophisticated form of discourse in which the speaker tries to induce a cognitive bias through consistent linkage between a topic and a specific context (frame). We build on political science and communication theory and use probabilistic topic models combined with time series regression analysis (autoregressive distributed-lag models) to gain insights about the language dynamics in the political processes. Processing four years of public statements issued by members of the U.S. Congress, our results provide a glimpse into the complex dynamic processes of framing, attention shifts and agenda setting, commonly known as 'spin'. We further provide new evidence for the divergence in party discipline in U.S. politics.

Leveraging Behavioral and Social Information for Weakly Supervised Collective Classification of Political Discourse on Twitter

“…Several previous works have explored framing in public statements, congressional speeches, and news articles (Fulgoni et al, 2016;Tsur et al, 2015;Card 1 http://psl.cs.umd.edu Baumer et al, 2015). Our approach builds upon the previous work on frame analysis of Boydstun et al (2014), by adapting and applying their annotation guidelines for Twitter.…”

“…While the first frame supports increasing minimum wage because it improves workers' lives, the second frame, by conversely emphasizing the costs involved, opposes the increase. Using framing to analyze political discourse has gathered significant interest over the last few years (Tsur et al, 2015;Card et al, 2015;Baumer et al, 2015) as a way to automatically analyze political discourse in congressional speeches and political news articles. Different from previous works which focus on these longer texts or single issues, our dataset includes tweets authored by all members of the U.S. Congress from both parties, dealing with several policy issues (e.g., immigration, ACA, etc.).…”

Ideological Phrase Indicators for Classification of Political Discourse Framing on Twitter

“…Several previous works have explored framing in public statements, congressional speeches, and news articles (Fulgoni et al, 2016;Tsur et al, 2015;Card et al, 2015;Baumer et al, 2015). Framing is further related to works which analyze biased language (Recasens et al, 2013;Choi et al, 2012;Greene and Resnik, 2009) and subjectivity (Wiebe et al, 2004).…”

“…Framing contextualizes the discussion by emphasizing specific aspects of the issue, which creates an association between the issue and a specific frame of reference. Research on issue framing in political discourse is rooted in social science research (Entman, 1993;Chong and Druckman, 2007) and recently has attracted growing interest in the natural language processing community (Tsur et al, 2015;Card et al, 2015;Baumer et al, 2015) as a way to automatically analyze political discourse in congressional speeches and political news articles. Contrary to these sources, Twitter requires politicians to compress their ideas and reactions into 140 character long tweets.…”

Argumentation Mining in Parliamentary Discourse

“…Boydstun et al further suggested that hierarchical topic models can be used for identifying frames. Tsur et al (2015) also considered various contexts of a specific topic as frames and tried to infer these frames using topic models and time series. In a related study, Nguyen et al (2015) used hierarchical topic models to model issues and the associated "frames".…”