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
| # | Manuscript |
|---|---|
| 8 | "News framing still works? Policy preferences of modern news consumers around the issue of social injustice" |
| 7 | "Party norms prevail: Instrumental voting, anti-Trump sentiment, and resistance to crossover voting" (with Jonathan Woon) |
| 6 | "The effect of non-presidential races on voter confidence" (with Nadine Suzanne Gibson) |
| 5 | "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
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 Party Polarization in Digital Fingerprints: Tracing Politicians’ Social Media Posts on the George Floyd Protests.
- ** Research Automated topic-based content and textual analysis of contemporary political news coverage: Issues of health care, immigration, and social injustice
Under what conditions do politicians express their views on social media? How do politicians express their opinions around a given issue on social media? This paper contends that issue ownership and electoral accountability are critical factors that drive politicians’ attitudes toward a politically salient issue. It conducts a case study on the 2020 George Floyd protests in the United States, using an original, computationally-gathered dataset of posts on Twitter. The multi-level analysis results suggest that politicians’ race and party affiliation, in conjunction with their constituencies’ partisan orientation and racial composition, played significant roles in determining the frequency of Floyd-related Twitter posts they shared. Additionally, topic modeling results demonstrate a disparity in how the political movement is phrased between Democrats and Republicans. These findings shed light on the motivations behind social media posting behavior by public officials and carry significant implications for party polarization in contemporary democracies.
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.