Browsing by Subject "Framing"
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Item Open Access Coverage of Burma in Six Elite Newspapers(2011-12-09) Fairchild, CarolineThis project compares the United States, United Kingdom and Thailand’s print media coverage of Burma. Examining six newspapers’ coverage of Burma in 2008 and 2010, the project studies how newspapers frame Burma differently in international coverage. For each newspaper, news coverage of Burma is driven by politics, with an emphasis on the political role of Aung San Suu Kyi. Aside from instances when a specific event demands international engagement with Burma, news organizations rely on policy elites to reduce the cost of reporting news about Burma.Item Open Access Crack-Whores and Pretty Woman: The Media Framing of Sex Workers(2018-12-05) Wang, VictoriaInternational human rights organizations such as the World Health Organization, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, and Amnesty International have advised nations to decriminalize sex work in order to protect the rights and safety of sex workers (“Sex Workers,” 2018; “Sex Workers,” 2014; “Q&A: Policy to Protect the Human Rights of Sex Workers,” 2016). However, policy-makers in the US ignore these recommendations in favor of the full criminalization of sex work (Weitzer, 2010). Media largely influence public perception and policing of sex work, and media framings of sex workers align more with the current policies on sex work in the US than the research conducted and the proposals made by accredited human rights organizations (Nelson, 1997). This study examines newspapers published in California and Texas between 2002 and 2018 to uncover how media frame sex workers. The dominant frames in this dataset, the criminal frame and the victim frame, perpetuate and are reinforced by the US’ stringent sex work policies. The same moral convictions which influenced the criminalization of sex work in the US underlay the dominant frames in the dataset.Item Open Access Framing Debate to Lift Children Out of the Political Divide(2017) Mandel, Adam MandelMany cost-effective, evidence-based developmental programs (EBPs) remain inaccessible to children in need. To improve access to care, this dissertation theoretically and then empirically examines different approaches to advocating for dissemination funding in a polarized political context. Section 1 describes recent advances in the use of morally framed messaging to change attitudes. Section 2 reviews research on political polarization with an emphasis on how polarization affects online message processing. Section 3 describes a theoretically informed EBP advocacy strategy that seeks to tailor and target advocacy messages to promote bipartisan support for EBP dissemination.
Sections 4, 5, and 6 describe three studies designed to test whether motivated social cognition (Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003) or moral foundations theory (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009) may be used to tailor message frames to speak to the distinct needs of Liberals and Conservatives. In Section 7, results and limitations are discussed. Although the three studies provide limited support for the hypothesis that theory can be used to design persuasive, tailored messages, message frames were consistently overwhelmed by competition from partisan cues and ideological arguments. The dissertation concludes by arguing that, in order to generate bipartisan support for EBP dissemination, implementation funding and structures that are already highly prioritized by Liberals need to be designed to appeal to Conservatives’ substantive policy preferences.
Item Open Access Full of Hot Air? Three Examinations of Climate Change in the American Political Information Environment(2016) Zhou, MenglinClimate change is thought to be one of the most pressing environmental problems facing humanity. However, due in part to failures in political communication and how the issue has been historically defined in American politics, discussions of climate change remain gridlocked and polarized. In this dissertation, I explore how climate change has been historically constructed as a political issue, how conflicts between climate advocates and skeptics have been communicated, and what effects polarization has had on political communication, particularly on the communication of climate change to skeptical audiences. I use a variety of methodological tools to consider these questions, including evolutionary frame analysis, which uses textual data to show how issues are framed and constructed over time; Kullback-Leibler divergence content analysis, which allows for comparison of advocate and skeptical framing over time; and experimental framing methods to test how audiences react to and process different presentations of climate change. I identify six major portrayals of climate change from 1988 to 2012, but find that no single construction of the issue has dominated the public discourse defining the problem. In addition, the construction of climate change may be associated with changes in public political sentiment, such as greater pessimism about climate action when the electorate becomes more conservative. As the issue of climate change has become more polarized in American politics, one proposed causal pathway for the observed polarization is that advocate and skeptic framing of climate change focuses on different facets of the issue and ignores rival arguments, a practice known as “talking past.” However, I find no evidence of increased talking past in 25 years of popular newsmedia reporting on the issue, suggesting both that talking past has not driven public polarization or that polarization is occurring in venues outside of the mainstream public discourse, such as blogs. To examine how polarization affects political communication on climate change, I test the cognitive processing of a variety of messages and sources that promote action against climate change among Republican individuals. Rather than identifying frames that are powerful enough to overcome polarization, I find that Republicans exhibit telltale signs of motivated skepticism on the issue, that is, they reject framing that runs counter to their party line and political identity. This result suggests that polarization constrains political communication on polarized issues, overshadowing traditional message and source effects of framing and increasing the difficulty communicators experience in reaching skeptical audiences.
Item Open Access Media Framing of the Ebola Crisis(2016-01-24) Vellek, TheresaThis study examines the role of international media framing in coverage of Ebola. A quantitative content analysis compared framing techniques in Ebola coverage across BBC Monitoring, The New York Times, The Daily Telegraph (UK), and The Straits Times (Singapore) in the 2000-2001 and 2014-2015 outbreaks. Results show that mutation contagion was by far the most frequently appearing frame in the media. Recent media coverage also mimicked the tendency to represent Ebola as distinctively “African,” as found in research on the 1990s Ebola outbreak. Additionally, the portrayal of Ebola as a globalized threat was especially important in coverage of the 2014 outbreak. Overall, media coverage of the Ebola crisis appeared highly politicized and event-based. Particularly because the media serve as the primary source of information about infectious disease epidemics for much of the public, their framing has implications for how the world views Ebola.Item Open Access Racial Framing and Public Support for Ex-Felon Disenfranchisement(2016-11-08) Pelle, MichaelIt is well documented that framing certain race-neutral policies, such as the death penalty, voter ID laws, and three-strikes laws, in terms of race can increase whites’ support for those laws. This study utilized a survey-based experiment to explore the impact of racial framing on voters’ support for repealing ex-felon disenfranchisement statutes. White respondents who were told that felon disenfranchisement disproportionately affects blacks were less supportive of restoring felons’ voting rights than were those given no racial frame. This impact was concentrated among white Republicans, and the racial frame had a minimal impact on white Democrats’ responses to the question. The survey also asked respondents for their opinions about restoring both felons’ voting rights and firearm rights. The difference between the control and experimental groups’ responses to this question was greater than the difference between the two groups’ responses to the question about voting rights alone. Republicans and Democrats responded similarly, with both expressing lesser support for restoring felons’ voting and gun rights when the issue was racially framed. Racial threat theory and negative attitudes about blacks help explain why whites became less supportive of ex-felon rights restoration when told that the issue disproportionately affects blacks. The survey also polled blacks, but the frame had a minimal impact on their opinions.Item Open Access Three Essays on Domestic Violence Related Firearms Regulations in the United States(2018) Smucker, SierraFirearms regulation rarely passes in the United States due to the strength of the gun rights lobby. However, in the past several years, policymakers in traditionally pro-gun states have passed laws that restrict domestic abusers’ access to firearms. The success of these policies suggests that domestic violence and firearms regulations may represent a rare opportunity for bipartisan agreement in this contentious policy area. This dissertation examines domestic violence related firearms regulations from three angles. The first chapter presents a qualitative comparative case study analysis of domestic violence and firearms legislation to understand how these policies overcame robust barriers to passage. The results demonstrate that the prominence of domestic violence prevention advocates and “strategic absence” of larger gun control groups in the policy process increased the probability of the legislation’s passage. The second chapter leverages an original survey experiment involving 1,000 participants in the Cooperative Congressional Election Survey (CCES) to test whether framing gun regulation as domestic violence prevention instead of gun control can increase support for the legislation. While I find that framing does not impact respondents’ support for a new law, women are more likely to support the policy than men. Importantly, this result remains significant after controlling for political party, suggesting that women’s collective action could bring about bipartisan cooperation on some gun regulations. The third and final chapter demonstrates the importance of preemptive gun regulations for reducing intimate partner homicide through an analysis of homicide data from the North Carolina Violent Death Reporting System. Together, this collection of studies sheds light on the politics and design of domestic violence and firearms regulation and creates a foundation for future research in this important policy area.
Item Open Access Why won’t it sell? Universal Health Care in America, 1945 - 2009(2009-12-04) Aberger, MarieThis project examines the language used to frame universal health care reform from 1945 to 2009, focusing on four frames: morality, efficacy, personal vulnerability, and fear of government. It analyzes whether the frames used by the opponents and proponents of reform evolved by researching three health care debates: President Truman from 1945-1950, President Clinton from 1993-1994, and President Obama in 2009.The analysis focuses on speeches given by the presidents, advertisements produced by interest groups, and newspaper coverage of the debates. For all three presidencies, fear of government was the frame most commonly used by opponents of reform in advertisements while morality was the frame most commonly used by proponents. This suggests that the language has not evolved significantly over the past sixty years and provides insight into why universal health care reform continues to fail. Notably, however, there is a trend in the Obama administration toward utilizing the personal vulnerability frame. Ultimately, this project found that self-interested arguments are the most effective, and therefore opponents should continue to address people’s fear of government while proponents should follow President Obama’s lead in utilizing the personal vulnerability frame.