Framing, Nontraditional Elites, and the American Ideological Divide

• In Event: Poster Session: Race, Ethnicity, and Politics II

Abstract

The propensity for conflicting conceptions of critical issues across the American ideological divide has coincided with the parties becoming better sorted and has been exacerbated by the reach of the Internet. I argue that nontraditional elites—Internet influencers, political extremists, and fringe religious leaders—frame issues of race, sex/gender, and religion in ways that lead their followers to perceive critical issues entirely differently, depending on which side of the ideological divide they’re on. Conflicting frames describing the fundamental characteristics of sociopolitical debates can foster political conflict. I test this argument using mixed methods on two hand-compiled and hand-coded corpora—one consisting of documentation of groups and movements on the American right (RW), the other of those on the American left (LW). Both corpora contain writings dating from the 1800s to the present, providing coverage of much of American history up to and including the Internet age. Employing process tracing approaches as well as word-embedding models, I illustrate the tendency across the RW corpus to frame issues of race, sex/gender, and religion in the language of perceived victimhood, status threats, and even perceived threats to survival—a trend often altogether absent across the LW corpus. By investigating how priorities and perceptions of the sociopolitical situation are framed for each side’s ideological adherents, I argue that scholars can gain more leverage through which to study the reach of mis- and dis-information perpetuated by nontraditional elites.

Author

• Anastasja Abraham, Mount Holyoke College