The Cross-National Diffusion of Abortion Frames

• In Event: Trip Through Your Wires: The Mediated Information Flow of Policy Content

Abstract

How do social movement actors' frames diffuse internationally? Comparative scholarship on the framing of political and social issues demonstrates that symbolic resonance is essential when it comes to how language can be transformational in society and is used strategically by social movement actors or other political actors. Previous studies (e.g., Ferree et al. 2002) have shown how differences in cultural and political structures produce distinctive frame types across countries. At the same time, however, instances of frame diffusion across international borders has been shown to occur, particularly with regard to pro-life framing of abortion as "murder" across cultural and political contexts (e.g., Roblinger and Meyer 2005).

In this work we greatly expand scholarship on the cross-national diffusion of abortion frames. We examine abortion frames appearing in national newspapers of record in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Republic of Ireland from 1980 to the present day. Using a combination of sentence-level embeddings, or vector representations of text, and community detection algorithms, we demonstrate on a much larger timescale how abortion frames diffuse across state boundaries at a large timescale. In the increasingly communicative realm of global politics this research is essential to understanding the successes and setbacks of abortion movements in different contexts.

Authors

• Kate Hunt, Indiana University-Bloomington

• Mike Gruszczynski, Indiana University