Resources and Methods for Analysing Political Rhetoric and Framing in Parliamentary Debates

Abstract

Recent work in political science has made exten- sive use of NLP methods to produce evidential sup- port for a variety of analyses, for example, inferring an actor’s ideological positions from textual data or identifying the polarisation of the political discourse over the last decades. Most work has employed variations of lexical features extracted from text or has learned latent representations in a mostly un- supervised manner. While such approaches have the potential to enable political analyses at scale, they are often limited by their lack of interpretabil- ity. In the talk, I will instead look at semantic and pragmatic representations of political rhethoric and ideological framing and present several case stud- ies that showcase how linguistic annotation and the use of NLP methods can help to investigate dif- ferent framing strategies in parliamentary debates. The first part of the talk investigates populist framing strategies, specifically, the use of pronouns to create in- and out-groups and the identification of people-centric messages. The second part of the presentation focusses on framing strategies on the pragmatic level.

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