Framing Inequality: Campaign Rhetoric in the New Gilded Age (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Text Analysis Techniques and Rhetoric

Abstract

Economic inequality is growing rapidly in the United States. As more attention is directed toward this phenomenon, political elites are experimenting with their rhetorical approaches. Some candidates center attention on the intersections between class, race, and gender; others frame class divides in terms of risk and anxiety. Some elites recall a more economically equal past, while others look to the future. Some focus on the working poor, others on billionaires. In addition to this variation in framing, political actors on the Left and Right connect runaway economic inequality to many different policy goals, from taxes to healthcare to criminal justice reform. These widely varying frames guide the way the mass public views and interprets inequality.

We focus on the discourse about inequality in the 2020 Presidential campaign. We analyze textual and visual data from social media, political ads, debates, and speeches to identify the inequality-related themes, tones, and images within candidate rhetoric. We first employ an interpretive approach with a subset of the data, drawing on a coding scheme that we previously developed to examine how Americans talk about those at the top and bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy (Condon and Wichowsky 2020). We then apply machine learning techniques to the full corpora of unstructured textual data. We put this analysis of elite discourse in dialogue with our previous studies to assess the similarities and differences in how political elites and mass publics explain the growing disparities in income and wealth among Americans and what, if anything, government should do about them.

Condon, Meghan, and Amber Wichowsky. 2020. The Economic Other: Inequality in the American Political Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Authors

• Meghan Condon, Loyola University Chicago

• Amber Wichowsky, Marquette University