Research

Media framing matters. And it matters a lot.
Both the global health crisis and the paradigm-shifting social unrest in recent years presented a unique opportunity to study the interaction of the news media, people, and politics: it is rare that citizens are so attentive to news about public issues, and even rarer that reactions to these issues rise to the level of active participation.

Work in progress

# Research Paper
7 [under review] "News framing still works? Policy preferences of modern news consumers around the issue of social injustice"
6 [under review] "'Violent riot' or 'peaceful protest'? U.S. politicians' attitudes toward George Floyd protests"
5 [under review] "New media and the propensity to participate in demonstrations and strikes in the United States" (with Tse-min Lin)
4 Framing effects on political participation of modern news consumers
3 Automated topic-based content and textual analysis of contemporary political news coverage: Issues of health care, immigration, and social injustice
2 Misinformation about misinformation? Of headlines and survey design (with Robert Luskin and Gaurav Sood)
1 Religion in Latino Politics (with David Leal)

News media framing

and survey experimentation

  • Thematic versus episodic news framing
  • Focus: News media effects on policy preference and political participation
  • Isssue: immigration, social injustice, health care
  • Data: Cooperative Election Study Modules

    • Data for the three issues can be found here:

    News media

    And computational research methodology

    • Web-crawled data (e.g., news articles, social media posts)
    • Neural network methods
    • Automated content and textual analysis
    • SQL database
    • ** Research
      'Violent riot' or 'peaceful protest'? U.S. politicians' attitudes toward George Floyd protests
      • As social injustice has been one of the most contentious issues in the United States politics, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party have shown dissimilar attitudes toward protests following the killing of George Floyd in May 2020. To what extent do the two parties differ with respect to willingness to publicly express opinions around the issue of racial justice on social media? How is political polarization manifested in the politicians’ social media posts about the nationwide protests?

      Based on an original dataset of texts posted on Twitter by 100 U.S. Senators about the protests during the first two weeks after Floyd’s death, this study examines occurrences and sentiments of the posts, as well as key factors that influence such issue attitude and expressive behavior.

      Evidence suggests that Democrats generally express more positive attitudes toward the protests (e.g., ‘peaceful’), whereas Republicans are more likely to associate the protests with negative connotations (e.g., ‘riots,’ ‘violence,’ ‘criminal,’ ‘looting’). Multi-level regression analyses indicate that—at the individual level—Democrats are more likely to publicly express their opinions about the protests and racial issues than Republicans, and that Black Senators are more likely than others to share their thoughts about the issues on social media. At the state level, higher Democratic share of the presidential votes and heavier composition of black population increase the number of posts by an individual senator about the issues. Overall, the empirical findings indicate a significant political polarization in the US revolving around social (in)justice.
      • ** Research
        Automated topic-based content and textual analysis of contemporary political news coverage: Issues of health care, immigration, and social injustice
        • Despite the conventional wisdom that thematic framing is more powerful in influencing public opinion, the media are ‘incentivized’ to employ episodic frames because they are immediate, straightforward, and more sensationalistic, which are more likely to draw eyeballs that result in higher viewership and ratings. The advent of the new media might have changed the distribution of thematic versus episodic framing today to an even more disproportionate pattern. An increase in the number of news outlets in recent years might mean a decrease in the number of consumers for any particular outlet. In such an environment, it is no stretch to expect that the contemporary news media have greater incentives than ever to frame news stories in an episodic manner.

        Based on an original dataset consisting of news articles published by four news outlets from the period of 2007 and 2022, this study analyzes how modern news media frame political issues. The issues selected for analysis include health care, immigration, and social (in)justice, all of which are critical topics in understanding politics, media, and mass opinion, espicially in the most recent decade with the changes in major parties and to rise of Trump and populism.