Invited Talk Ⅰ: Same Policy Issue, Different Portrayal: The Importance of Tone and Framing in Language

摘要

Many policy issues at the center of politics are relatively fixed; they tend to involve the same basic questions that do not vary over time (e.g., should abortion be legal? should we execute people convicted of horrific crimes?). Political candidates, too, are (like the rest of us) the same people year after year (e.g., Hillary Clinton in 2016 is just an older version of Hillary Clinton in 2015). Yet when citizens consider a given political item (be it a policy issue, a candidate, or something else), they tend not to perceive that item in a fixed way over time. Rather, peoples perceptions of the item tend to depend on how that item is portrayed at that moment. Policy issues and political candidates alike can be portrayed differently through the use of different visual imagery but even more pervasively through variance in the text used to describe them. In this talk, I give a general overview of the importance of issue and candidate portrayals in political communication. I outline the extensive research that has already been done trying to identify different portrayals in text. And I discuss the many opportunities available today to researchers interested in tracking issue and candidate portrayals in text and in examining the effects of issue and candidate portrayals on public attitudes and voting behavior.