The Negative Side of Moral Politics: How Moral Frames Make an Adversary in Politics?

• In Event: 4322 - Section on Political Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 10. Perspectives on Current Political Issues

Abstract

How has morality been shaping political frames of modern politics? Moral foundations theory (Haidt 2012) suggests strong evidence that moral aspects are an important driver of the polarization and conflicts in modern politics. Even though the potential of this theory as a toolkit of sociological research on morality, only a few works have used it for analyzing moral aspects of the framing process. The author integrates a novel computational approach to text data with a massive dataset on political articles to show the different moral strategies of each party and their detailed purpose in the discursive field. The word embedding algorithm proves that the left uses more individualistic moral values and that the right prefers communitarian ones, but the purposes of each moral foundations are totally contrasting. The conservative party exploits the moral words to blame the opposite party, while the liberal party utilizes it to express themselves. This implies that the political framing relying on conservative moral values might tend to stimulate hostile political cultures and finally deteriorate the solidarity of the society. The author concludes by suggesting the implications of these results and further research plans for computational text analysis on the framing process.

Author

• Changdong Oh, Yonsei University