Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

The measurement of meaning

Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1994, Vol 39(2), 225. Reviews the book, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992). The author's commendable effort to specify a model of mass opinion formation offers readers an introduction to the prevailing vi

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.

Research Interviewing: Context and Narrative

One critical function that news narratives perform is orienting action: Providing a selective, coherent account of events, they suggest what needs to be done, coordinating and motivating public agendas. The importance of news narratives’ agendas for action has been particularly salient in the coverage of conflict 1 (Wolfsfeld 1997, Robinson et al. 2010): Conflict spurns heated debates wherein advocated courses of action collide, while audiences rely heavily on various media to comprehend ongoing events. Keeping track of the cacophony of agendas advanced in print and online newspapers and magazines, social media, and other public discourse confronts news readers, journalists, decision makers, and scholars alike with a major challenge. Computer assisted analyses have the potential to help comprehending conflict news, distilling agendas for action and possibly predicting the mobilization of consensus and collective action (Snow and Benford 1988). This paper presents the INFOCORE consortium’s ongoing efforts at automatically capturing agendas in conflict discourse, employing NLP technology and statistical analysis. We demonstrate the utility and potential of our approach using coverage of the Syrian chemical weapons crisis in 2013.

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To Do or Not to Do: the Role of Agendas for Action in Analyzing News Coverage of Violent Conflict

As expressions without clear definition but with strong normative charging, empty signifiers play an important role in political discourse. Uniting diverse populations under a common banner and endowing political demands with self-evident legitimacy, they constitute a potent tool for rallying support for political action. Among empty signifiers, one particularly versatile construct are ‘the people’ as bearers of ultimate political legitimacy. In this paper, we investigate how ‘the people’ are constructed in propagandistic conflict narratives during the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, imbuing the concept with different meanings in the pursuit of competing political ends. We show how ‘the people’ are constructed as democratic sovereign, enduring nation, moral humans or dispersed media publics, each time summoning different kinds of legitimacy and using different strategies to construct encompassing consensus and marginalize dissent. We discuss implications for the study of ideological discourse, populism and political communication.

Who are ‘the people’? Uses of empty signifiers in propagandistic news discourse

Frames are indispensable tools for journalists to make sense of unfolding events, but they also constrain their perspective to most readily see what they expect to see. In this study, we examine ho...

Maintenance of News Frames: How US, British and Russian News Made Sense of Unfolding Events in the Syrian Chemical Weapons Crisis

Frames do not naturally occur on their own, they are embedded in wider, often strategically crafted narratives. This paper proposes a conceptualization which contextualizes frames, highlighting functional relations, semantic coherence, and compositional overlaps between frames. It criticizes existing frame-analytic methodologies based on their preoccupation with the individual, artificially isolated frame, and suggests an alternative approach that retains the context of frames. Implementing this approach using techniques adapted from the semantic network analysis (SNA) of discourse, the paper investigates the framing strategies advanced by Dutch political parties in the EU constitutional referendum campaign. The analysis finds a differentiated center-periphery structure in the alignment of frames in strategic discourse: While the core argument is typically defined by two contrasting, central frames, various peripheral frames further elaborate the core’s situation definition and causal explanations. Frames thus react in systematic ways to the discursive environment in which they appear.

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Contextualizing frames in political discourse: using semantic network analysis to investigate political parties' framing strategies in the Dutch EU referendum campaign

Christian Baden

Papers

To Do or Not to Do: the Role of Agendas for Action in Analyzing News Coverage of Violent Conflict

Who are ‘the people’? Uses of empty signifiers in propagandistic news discourse

Maintenance of News Frames: How US, British and Russian News Made Sense of Unfolding Events in the Syrian Chemical Weapons Crisis

Contextualizing frames in political discourse: using semantic network analysis to investigate political parties' framing strategies in the Dutch EU referendum campaign

Semantic association and weighted consideration: How framing shifts people's information bases in opinion formation