{"id":253,"date":"2014-08-28T16:59:20","date_gmt":"2014-08-28T20:59:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/haystaqdna.com\/?p=253"},"modified":"2014-08-28T17:13:40","modified_gmt":"2014-08-28T21:13:40","slug":"whats-in-a-frame-the-construction-of-debate-surrounding-obamacare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/haystaqdna.com\/staging\/8843\/whats-in-a-frame-the-construction-of-debate-surrounding-obamacare\/","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s in a frame?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A new study conducted by Haystaq Fellow and Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Mary Washington Chad Murphy finds that Democrats in Congress are actually more negative about \u201cObamacare\u201d than their Republican counterparts, while both parties view \u201chealthcare\u201d much more positively.<\/p><p>Derek Willis at <em>The Upshot<\/em> recently published an article about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/08\/28\/upshot\/the-word-on-obamacare-as-measured-by-congressional-news-releases.html?abt=0002&abg=1\">the decline in the use of the word \u201cObamacare\u201d in congressional news releases<\/a>, arguing that it seems to be \u201cshrinking as a political issue.\u201d He finds that this summer, members of Congress only used the word \u201cObamacare\u201d 138 times this summer compared to 530 times during the same time period last year. He also noted on Twitter that Democrats are much more likely to use the phrase \u201cAffordable Care Act\u201d than \u201cObamacare\u201d by a 16:1 margin. Does this gap in language between the two parties matter?<\/p><p>Many <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/id\/101064954#.\">news organizations<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/pollingmatters.gallup.com\/2013\/11\/whats-in-name-affordable-care-act-vs.html\">polling firms<\/a> have shown differences in survey responses depending on what people call the act, and there was of course <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=sx2scvIFGjE\">Jimmy Kimmel\u2019s take on this issue<\/a>. But there is surprisingly little research into how politicians frame the healthcare law. So to answer this question, we used the <a href=\"http:\/\/capitolwords.org\/api\/1\/\">Capitol Words API<\/a> to download all congressional speeches in the most recent Congress. We then used <a href=\"http:\/\/www.voteview.com\/\">DW-NOMINATE scores<\/a> to rank the members in terms of ideology and divide them into five quintiles (most liberal, liberal, moderate, conservative, and most conservative). Finally, we applied the HiDEx model to analyze the sentiment of each of these groups for \u201cObamacare\u201d and \u201chealthcare.\u201d Our results were surprising.<\/p><p><a href=\"http:\/\/haystaqdna.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/Chart2.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-254\" src=\"http:\/\/haystaqdna.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/Chart2-1024x633.jpg\" alt=\"Chart2\" width=\"640\" height=\"395\" srcset=\"https:\/\/haystaqdna.com\/staging\/8843\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/Chart2-1024x633.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/haystaqdna.com\/staging\/8843\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/Chart2-300x185.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\" \/><\/a><\/p><p>In the graph, positive numbers represent positive sentiment toward the concept, while negative numbers represent negative sentiment. As the figure shows, when Democrats use the frame \u201cObamacare\u201d they are actually more negative than Republicans, with the second most liberal quintile being the most negative about the word.<\/p><p>This doesn\u2019t mean that Democrats are more negative toward the \u201cAffordable Care Act,\u201d instead it means that Democrats have potentially internalized the negativity of the frame, while Republicans are potentially more likely to use \u201cObamacare\u201d as a colloquial title with less emotion attached to the word itself. While they label it \u201cObamacare\u201d less frequently than their Republican counterparts, they do so more negatively, which would possibly help explain why the term has such power in public discourse. Democratic members of Congress dislike \u201cObamacare\u201d even as they\u2019re more likely to support the \u201cAffordable Care Act\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A new study conducted by Haystaq Fellow and Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Mary Washington Chad Murphy finds that Democrats in Congress are actually more negative about \u201cObamacare\u201d than their Republican counterparts, while both parties view \u201chealthcare\u201d much more positively.Derek Willis at The Upshot recently published an article about the decline [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>What\u2019s in a frame? 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