Characterizing partisan political narrative frameworks about COVID-19 on Twitter

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis that has been testing every society and exposing the critical role of local politics in crisis response. In the United States, there has been a strong partisan divide between the Democratic and Republican party’s narratives about the pandemic which resulted in polarization of individual behaviors and divergent policy adoption across regions. As shown in this case, as well as in most major social issues, strongly polarized narrative frameworks facilitate such narratives. To understand polarization and other social chasms, it is critical to dissect these diverging narratives. Here, taking the Democratic and Republican political social media posts about the pandemic as a case study, we demonstrate that a combination of computational methods can provide useful insights into the different contexts, framing, and characters and relationships that construct their narrative frameworks which individual posts source from. Leveraging a dataset of tweets from the politicians in the U.S., including the ex-president, members of Congress, and state governors, we found that the Democrats’ narrative tends to be more concerned with the pandemic as well as financial and social support, while the Republicans discuss more about other political entities such as China. We then perform an automatic framing analysis to characterize the ways in which they frame their narratives, where we found that the Democrats emphasize the government’s role in responding to the pandemic, and the Republicans emphasize the roles of individuals and support for small businesses. Finally, we present a semantic role analysis that uncovers the important characters and relationships in their narratives as well as how they facilitate a membership categorization process. Our findings concretely expose the gaps in the “elusive consensus” between the two parties. Our methodologies may be applied to computationally study narratives in various domains.

Filling the Ideological Void: ‘Restorative’ Nostalgia and the Radical Right Parties in Romania

“…However, until 2002, there were no straightforward legal means to penalize Holocaust denial (EO 31/2002). Third, as in all analyses referring to political narratives and hidden mythological structures, there is a danger of subjectivity (Jing -Ahn 2021). To avoid such limitations, I start from the assumption that "the images of the past and the future are not just linear relationships from the present, but also depend on the accumulation of previous such relationships and their continuous constitution and reconstitution" tr th 2005: 257).…”

Economic risk framing increases intention to vaccinate among Republican COVID-19 vaccine refusers

“…Numerous studies demonstrate that politicized and divergent party narratives about the pandemic on social media might help explain the observed partisan gap ( Feng & Shao, 2022 ; Panda, 2020 ). Although prior authors examining traditional media sources such as newspapers and television have noted that coverage surrounding discussions of COVID-19 from March to May 2020 was highly politicized ( Hart, 2020 ), studies focusing on Twitter in particular show that the Democratic party put more emphasis on public health, whereas the Republican party put more focus on national unity, China's alleged culpability for the pandemic, and the impacts of the pandemic on business ( Jing & Ahn, 2021 ). Thus, as the pandemic unfolded, politicians used Twitter to help the public interpret events with responses increasingly divided across political ideological lines.…”

Moral Emotions Shape the Virality of COVID-19 Misinformation on Social Media

“…Since socially connected users often develop similar ideas and intuitions [8,13,23,39], moral emotions are a key driver of information diffusion in polarized social media environments [8]. In the context of COVID-19, the overall discussion culture has repeatedly been characterized as highly polarized [1,17,21,31,32,34]. For instance, people have been observed to be divided in their perceptions of government responses, confidence in scientists, and support for protective actions [31,34].…”

“…In the context of COVID-19, the overall discussion culture has repeatedly been characterized as highly polarized [1,17,21,31,32,34]. For instance, people have been observed to be divided in their perceptions of government responses, confidence in scientists, and support for protective actions [31,34]. If COVID-19 rumors are highly polarizing to social media users, then the transmission of moral emotions likely plays a key role in the rumors' diffusion through social networks.…”