The Shifting Terms of Debate: Examining Policy Discussion and Debate in Congress

• In Event: Social Media and Speech in Legislative Politics

Abstract

Consistently—and almost continuously—the media report on both what our elected members of Congress are saying and how they say it. However, often in our studies of how members use social media, speak on the floor, or otherwise talk in public statements, we completely separate the two. What happens if we study the simultaneously? To answer this, I examine what policy areas the Democratic and Republican choose to talk about given their majority party status, policy priorities, public concerns, the formal legislative agenda, and the other party. Then, I question and examine how each party discusses those issues—what frames and arguments they use—given their brand and majority party status. Finally, I allow the two to interact. To facilitate this and test hypotheses arising from previous studies concerning what is discussed and what frames they use, I introduce a dataset of speeches given on the floor of each chamber between the 104th through the 112th Congress. I first code each speech for the primary policy discussed using semi-supervised machine learning and the major topic codes from the Comparative Agendas Project. Then each speech is coded for primary frame and its general type using dynamic topic models. The general frame types are: policy oriented, procedural, and valanced. Using this unique dataset, I first show that the same patterns are observed in both the House and Senate as to what influences what is discussed, and that majority party status conditions how public concerns and the formal agenda drive policy discussion. Then I show that each party favors different sets of frames in accordance their party’s brands and that whether they are in the majority or minority additionally shapes which frames and frame types are used.

Author

• Kelsey Shoub, University of South Carolina