Uncovering ideological frames in political discourses (UNCOVER)

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Simone Paolo Ponzetto; Dr. Ines Rehbein
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 504852786

Recent years have shown the potential of quantitative and computational methods from the areas of computer science and computational linguistics for developing new approaches to tackle qualitative research questions in political science. This project proposal presents such a new, inter-disciplinary approach for modelling the use of framing in political communication, specifically, in parliamentary debates from the German Bundestag. We explore how the framing of entities in political speeches is used to deliver ideological messages and develop a machine-readable, human-interpretable representation of political communication and its ideological background. We investigate how to automatically acquire such machine-readable representations of ideological framing that capture overt and latent similarities across political actors. Our models of ideological framing provide us with a structured view of the discourse of different political actors and parties. This allows us to measure ideological coherence and to enable novel analyses that use text-as-data for better understanding ideological shifts and the polarization of political discourses. We address several shortcomings of previous work, in particular the lack of interpretability of existing models, by grounding our human-interpretable representations of ideological framing in theoretical frameworks from political science and psychology. Our approach brings together ideas from the Narrative Policy Framework, Moral Foundations Theory and frame-semantic parsing in a novel way. Specifically, we model ideological framing, based on entity-centric and topic-specific ideological frames, their participants and latent moral values. We then use our representations to investigate research questions focusing on frame and ideology coherence as well as the evolution of frames over time, based on a series of highly relevant case studies of contemporary German party politics.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: United Kingdom, USA
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Goran Glavas
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Nikolay Marinov; Dr. Federico Nanni