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Category: Policy frames

New tool for discourse network analysis

EJPR has just published an article introducing a new tool for ‘discourse network analysis’. Using the tool, you can measure and visualize political discourses and the networks of actors affiliated to each discourse. One can study the actor congruence networks (based on the number of statements actors share), concept congruence networks (based on whether statements are used by an actor in the same way) and trace the evolution of both over time. Here is a graph taken from the paper which illustrates the actor congruence networks for the issue of software patents in the EU (click to enlarge): The discourse networks analysis tool is free and available from the website of Philip Leifeld, one of the co-authors of the article. I can’t wait to get my hands on the program and try it out for myself. The tool promises to be an interesting alternative to evolutionary factor analysis – another new method for studying policy frames and discourses that I recently discussed – with the added benefit of being able to present actors and frames in an integrated analysis.   Here is the abstract of the EJPR article (there are more resources at this website): In 2005, the European Parliament rejected the directive ‘on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions’, which had been drafted and supported by the European Commission, the Council and well-organised industrial interests, with an overwhelming majority. In this unusual case, a coalition of opponents of software patents prevailed over a strong industry-led coalition. In this article, an explanation is developed based on political…

The decline of the death penalty

I just finished reading ‘The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence’ (link, link to book’s website) by Frank Baumgartner, Suzana De Boef and Amber Boydstun. It is a fine study of the rise of the ‘innocence’ frame and the decline of the use of capital punishment in the US (I have recently posted about the death penalty). The book has received well-deserved praise from several academic corners (list of reviews here). In this post I want to focus on several issues that, in my opinion, deserve further discussion. One of the major contributions of the book is methodological. The systematic study of policy frames (‘discourse’ is a related concept that seems to be getting out of fashion) is in many ways the holy grail of policy analysis – while we all intuitively feel that words and arguments and ideas matter more than standard models of collective decision making allow, it is quite tricky to demonstrate when and how these words and arguments and ideas matter. Policy frame analysis became something of a hype during the late 1970s and the 1980s, but it delivered less than it promised, so people started to look away (as this Google Ngram shows). Baumgartner, De Boef and Boydstun have produced a book with the potential to re-invigorate research into the impact of policy frames. So far, the usual way to analyze quantitatively policy frames has been to count the number of newspaper articles on a topic, measure their tone (pro/anti) and classify the arguments into some predefined clusters (the frames). This is what the authors do with respect…