The (Dis)Advantage of Certainty: The Importance of Certainty in Language

Corley, Pamela C.; Wedeking, Justin

doi:10.1111/lasr.12058

Cited by 68 publications

(43 citation statements)

References 62 publications

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“…The LIWC program analyzes written texts and calculates percentages of certain types of language (see Berry, Pennebaker, Mueller, & Hiller, 1997;Pennebaker, 1997), and it offers the advantage of allowing for the analysis of a large volume of texts. LIWC has been validated and used successfully in social science research (see Tausczik & Pennebaker, 2010), including political science (see Corley & Wedeking, 2014;Merry, 2010;Owens & Wedeking, 2011). To capture the different types of characters and settings that might appear in gun policy groups' Facebook posts, I constructed numerous dictionaries of key words and phrases (listed in Appendix A).…”

Section: Research Data and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Narrative Strategies in the Gun Policy Debate: Exploring Proximity and Social Construction

Merry¹

2018

Policy Studies Journal

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While much scholarship has explored the framing of gun policy, the bulk of that work has focused on general themes or arguments made in support or opposition to gun control. This study offers a more nuanced examination of the framing in the gun policy debate, utilizing the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to identify rhetorical and political strategies of gun control and gun rights organizations. Drawing on a data set of more than 58,000 Facebook posts by 15 gun policy organizations, I examine how groups portray the victims of gun violence, particularly with respect to the race and age of victims. I also examine the types of gun violence that groups emphasize on social media. The findings suggest that gun control organizations seek to broaden the scope of debate by focusing on child victims and on mass shootings. Gun rights organizations pursue a similar strategy, but with a focus on self‐defense shootings. Despite the fact that gun violence primarily affects minorities, both types of organizations rarely mentioned race. I attribute this to groups' efforts to emphasize proximate and positively constructed characters. This research suggests that both types of organizations systematically distort the nature of the gun policy problem.

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Section: Research Data and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Narrative Strategies in the Gun Policy Debate: Exploring Proximity and Social Construction

Merry¹

2018

Policy Studies Journal

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“…Wedeking, 2014;Owens andWedeking, 2011, 2012;Settle et al, 2016). The program scans documents and uses a language-specific dictionary to assign each word to one or more categories.…”

Section: Measuring Campaign Sentimentmentioning

confidence: 99%

It’s Not Only What you Say, It’s Also How You Say It: The Strategic Use of Campaign Sentiment

Crabtree¹,

Golder²,

Gschwend³

et al. 2018

Preprint

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What explains the type of electoral campaign run by political parties? We provide a new perspective on campaigns that focuses on the strategic use of emotive language. We argue that the level of positive sentiment parties adopt in their campaigns depends on their incumbency status, their policy position, and objective economic conditions. We test these claims with a novel dataset that captures the emotive language used in over 400 party manifestos across eight European countries. As predicted, we find that incumbent parties, particularly incumbent prime ministerial parties, use more positive sentiment than opposition parties. We find that ideologically moderate parties employ higher levels of positive sentiment than extremist parties. And we find that all parties exhibit lower levels of positive sentiment when the economy is performing poorly but that this negative effect is weaker for incumbents. Our analysis has important implications for research on campaign strategies and retrospective voting. (Downs, 1957;Ansolabehere and Snyder, 2000; Schofield, 2003;Adams, 2001;Adams, Merrill and Grofman, 2005;Adams, Scheiner and Kawasumi, 2016). The second dimension captures campaign focus -whether parties adopt campaign messages that focus on themselves or their opponents (Skaperdas and Grofman, 1995;Lau and Pomper, 2002;Geer, 2006;Elmelund-Praestekaer, 2008Hansen and Pedersen, 2008). One aspect of campaigns that is ignored in this two-dimensional framework is campaign sentiment, which refers to the emotive content of campaigns. Whereas campaign content and campaign focus address what parties say and who they say it about, campaign sentiment addresses how they say it.Scholars are increasingly looking at how the emotive content of campaign messages affects voter behavior Roseman, Abelson and Ewing, 1986;Weber, Searles and Ridout, 2011;Utych, 2018). The common thread in this literature is that voters are not merely influenced by the substantive content of campaigns but also by their emotive content. Studies have repeatedly shown that electoral campaigns can be manipulated to trigger emotional responses that, in turn, produce predictable changes in voter behavior. This raises a natural question. If campaign sentiment influences voter behavior, political actors should be strategic about its use. Are they? To date, there has been little research that explicitly looks at the strategic use of emotion in election campaigns. What research there is tends to focus on the historically majoritarian systems in the United States and the United Kingdom (Ridout and Searles, 2011; Kosmidis et al., Forthcoming). 1 In this article, we examine the strategic use of emotive language in European election campaigns.Studies that look at emotion in campaigns often focus on the use of images and music . However, language can also engender different types of sentiment, such as fear, anxiety, sadness, or optimism (Roseman, Abelson and Ewing, 1986;Pennebaker, 1993;Pennebaker and Francis, 1996). We build on a long tradition that emphasizes...

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“…For our primary independent variable, we recognize that a debate exists in the literature regarding which readability measure is best, as reliance on a specific measure of readability varies across studies (Black et al, 2011;Corley, 2008;Corley and Wedeking, 2014;Nelson and Hinkle, 2018;Owens and Wedeking, 2011). All readability measures are an assessment of two important factors: reader comprehension and text complexity.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, citations of opinions are often used as evidence to show that opinion content, reasoning, and language persist to influence subsequent judges (Cross and Spriggs, ; Fowler et al., ), or to show support or expansion of the scope of precedent as it develops over time (Hansford and Spriggs, ). A judge may use citations of cases for a variety of reasons, including ideology (Hinkle, ), legal clarity (Corley and Wedeking, ), persuasiveness and argument clarity (Nelson and Hinkle, ), or to account for stare decisis (Schauer, ). Citations can show that a precedent is impacting the law independently of whether those citations are made in a positive, negative, or neutral way, in much the same way that Corley () argues that the use of language from party briefs in the Supreme Court's opinions has an influence on the law regardless of whether the brief influenced the Court's decision.…”

Section: Readability and Impactmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Effect of Opinion Readability on the Impact of U.S. Supreme Court Precedents in State High Courts

Fix

Fairbanks

2019

Social Science Quarterly

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Objective This article examines whether more readable U.S. Supreme Court opinions are cited with greater frequency in state courts of last resort. Methods We use random slope, random intercept multilevel models to analyze 30 years of state high court citations to U.S. Supreme Court majority opinions issued during the 1987–2006 terms. Results Our analysis reveals that opinion readability exerts a strong substantive impact on citation rates. This effect holds while accounting for a variety of factors previously shown to influence citation rates. Conclusion Institutional constraints, workload considerations, and audience costs should lead state high courts to find clearly written opinions more attractive than jargon‐laden ones. This makes the readability of a U.S. Supreme Court precedent a useful heuristic for state courts when selecting among potential relevant precedents. As these courts play a major role in implementing U.S Supreme Court decisions, our findings indicate that the readability of U.S. Supreme Court opinions has a strong effect on their long‐term impact.

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The (Dis)Advantage of Certainty: The Importance of Certainty in Language

Cited by 68 publications

References 62 publications

Narrative Strategies in the Gun Policy Debate: Exploring Proximity and Social Construction

Narrative Strategies in the Gun Policy Debate: Exploring Proximity and Social Construction

It’s Not Only What you Say, It’s Also How You Say It: The Strategic Use of Campaign Sentiment

The Effect of Opinion Readability on the Impact of U.S. Supreme Court Precedents in State High Courts

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