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   https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12355  

   Winburn, Jonathan ; Winburn, Amanda ( May 2020 , Politics & Policy)

   All 50 U.S. states now have some type of Antibullying law on the books, and since the initial passage of these bills, many states are now moving into the next phase of policy implementation by reforming and updating their initial legislation. While the initial adoption phase in most states was of low salience and noncontroversial for the public, there is now a more politically divisive debate surrounding the topic: enumerating the laws to protect specific groups. We discuss the use of Antibullying policies around the country along with the political debate over enumeration. Empirically, we examine public attitudes toward adding enumerated protections to existing Antibullying laws for various groups. Using a survey experiment from the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we find that public support for enumeration depends on both the group characteristics considered for protection and individuals' ideology.

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2. Two Computational Models for Analyzing Political Attention in Social Media

   Hemphill, L. ; Schöpke-Gonzalez, A. M. ( January 2020 , Proceedings of the Fourteenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media)

   Understanding how political attention is divided and over what subjects is crucial for research on areas such as agenda setting, framing, and political rhetoric. Existing methods for measuring attention, such as manual labeling according to established codebooks, are expensive and can be restrictive. We describe two computational models that automatically distinguish topics in politicians' social media content. Our models---one supervised classifier and one unsupervised topic model---provide different benefits. The supervised classifier reduces the labor required to classify content according to pre-determined topic list. However, tweets do more than communicate policy positions. Our unsupervised model uncovers both political topics and other Twitter uses (e.g., constituent service). These models are effective, inexpensive computational tools for political communication and social media research. We demonstrate their utility and discuss the different analyses they afford by applying both models to the tweets posted by members of the 115th U.S. Congress. 

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3. Detecting Frames in News Headlines and Lead Images in U.S. Gun Violence Coverage

   https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.339  

   Tourni, Isidora ; Guo, Lei ; Daryanto, Taufiq Husada ; Zhafransyah, Fabian ; Halim, Edward Edberg ; Jalal, Mona ; Chen, Boqi ; Lai, Sha ; Hu, Hengchang ; Betke, Margrit ; et al ( January 2021 , Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. November 2021, pages 4037-4050, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic.)

   News media structure their reporting of events or issues using certain perspectives. When describing an incident involving gun violence, for example, some journalists may focus on mental health or gun regulation, while others may emphasize the discussion of gun rights. Such perspectives are called “frames” in communication research. We study, for the first time, the value of combining lead images and their contextual information with text to identify the frame of a given news article. We observe that using multiple modes of information(article- and image-derived features) improves prediction of news frames over any single mode of information when the images are relevant to the frames of the headlines. We also observe that frame image relevance is related to the ease of conveying frames via images, which we call frame concreteness. Additionally, we release the first multimodal news framing dataset related to gun violence in the U.S., curated and annotated by communication researchers. The dataset will allow researchers to further examine the use of multiple information modalities for studying media framing. 

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4. Bounded Stories

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   Shanahan, Elizabeth A. ; Raile, Eric D. ; French, Kate A. ; McEvoy, Jamie ( November 2018 , Policy Studies Journal)

   Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) and framing scholars share an interest in how the construction of policy arguments influences opinions and policy decisions. However, conceptual clarification is needed. This study advances the NPF by clarifying the meaning and function of frames and narrative, as well as their respective roles in creating policy realities. We explore sociological and psychological roots of framing scholarship and map these onto NPF's science of narratives philosophy, suggesting that narratives can reveal internally held cognitive schemas. We focus on issue categorization frames as boundaries for narrative construction. Within these bounds, narrative settings further focalize the audience by specifying where action toward a solution takes place. Based on 26 interviews with floodplain decision makers in Montana, we capture internally held cognitions through the assemblage of issue categorization frames and narrative elements. We find that settings can traverse issue categorization frames and policy solutions, with actions of characters that unfold within the setting being key. Similarly, we find that a single issue categorization frame can contain multiple different narratives and that individuals may simultaneously hold multiple different narratives internally. Overall, this study contributes to policy process research through establishment of connections among narratives, issue categorization frames, and cognitive schemas.

    

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5. Politics of attributing extreme events and disasters to climate change

   https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.750  

   Lahsen, Myanna ; Ribot, Jesse ( December 2021 , WIREs Climate Change)

   Climate change certainly shapes weather events. However, describing climate and weather as the cause of disasters can be misleading, since disasters are caused by pre‐existing fragilities and inequalities on the ground. Analytic frames that attribute disaster to climate can divert attention from these place‐based vulnerabilities and their socio‐political causes. Thus, while politicians may want to blame crises on climate change, members of the public may prefer to hold government accountable for inadequate investments in flood or drought prevention and precarious living conditions. To be both strategic and moral, framing choices must therefore be sensitive to context‐dependent political meanings and particularities, and to how the values implicit within analytic frames about the causes of disasters shape policy responses. Such sensitivity requires multicausal analysis of weather‐linked disasters to illuminate a broader range of means to reduce the damages associated with climate change and weather extremes. Through examples from around the world, and especially Brazil, we discuss how and why climate‐centric disaster framing can erase from view—and, thus, from policy agendas—the very socio‐economic and political factors that most centrally cause vulnerability and suffering in weather extremes and disasters. We also offer a theoretical discussion of why attribution is not neutral. Analytic frameworks always embed choices about factors that matter, and thus are inherently normative and consequential for understandings of responsibility and action.

   This article is categorized under:

   Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Climate Science and Decision Making

   Attributing crises only to climate is inadequate from a mechanical, moral, and strategic policy points of view.

    

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