When is the World Reversed? Economic Representation of Nation-States in U.S. Media, 1981 to 2014

• In Event: Formal Models and Methods for the Study of Culture and Meaning (Co-sponsored by Sociology of Culture Section)

Abstract

Although recent studies show that between-country income inequality has declined since the early 2000s, far less attention has been devoted to how global inequality is symbolically constructed and represented. This paper examines how U.S. media constructed the economic representation of foreign nation-states from 1981 to 2014 and asks whether symbolic hierarchies converge alongside material inequalities or instead diverge. Drawing on approximately 1.3 million New York Times articles, I estimate sentence-level economic valence toward countries using a fine-tuned transformer-based language model (DeBERTa-v3). Comparing trends in media dispersion with between-country income inequality reveals a striking divergence: while global income inequality steadily declines, the dispersion of economic representations in U.S. media increases sharply during two periods, 1991–1998 and 2007–2011. These surges coincide with major geopolitical and economic crises—the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Great Recession—suggesting that periods of upheaval prompt U.S. media discourse to amplify symbolic stratification among nation-states.

Author

• Jungsik Choi, Pennsylvania State University