Abstract:
How has morality been shaping political frames of modern politics? Despite the importance of moral agendas in politics has been increasing, scholars have been suffered troubles for investigating effects and consequences of morality in political issue framing process. Using theoretical structures of moral foundations theory (Haidt 2012), The author integrates a novel computational approach on text data with a massive dataset on political articles to show the different moral strategies of each party and their detailed purpose in political discourses. The word embedding algorithm proves that the left uses more individualistic moral values and that the right prefers communitarian ones, but the purposes of each moral foundations are totally contrasting. The conservative party exploits the moral words to blame the opposite party, while the liberal party utilizes it to express themselves. This implies that the political framing relying on conservative moral values might tend to stimulate hostile political cultures and finally deteriorate the solidarity of the society. The author concludes by suggesting the implications of these results and further research plans for computational text analysis on the framing process.