DISCOURSE & POLICY CHANGE

ELITE DISCOURSE, THE POLICY PROCESS, & POLICY CHANGE

Peer-Reviewed Article(s)

• Blum, Rachel, Lindsey Cormack and Kelsey Shoub. Forthcoming. "Conditional Communication: How Members of Congress Use Public Facing Communication." Political Science Research and Methods. 
  [Article][Replication Materials]

• Greene, Jon, Jared Edgerton, Daniel Naftel, Kelsey Shoub, and Skyler Cranmer. 2020. "Elusive Consensus: Polarization in Elite Communication on the COVID-19 Pandemic." Science Advances. 
  [Article] [Replication Materials]

  • "Politicizing and Polarizing the Pandemic ​Pinned America as Global Epicenter"by Hannah Osborne in Newsweek

​

​Research in Progress

• Jared Edgerton*, Skyler Cranmer, Kelsey Shoub, and Brice Acree.  "Racial and Gender Priming in Partisan Television Media." Under Review.

• Daniel Naftel*, Jon Green, Jared Edgerton, Mallory Wagner*, Kelsey Shoub, & Skyler Cranmer. "Meet the Press: Gendered Conversational Norms in Televised Political Discussion." Under Review. [Pre-Print]

• Shoub, Kelsey, Jon Green, Lindsey Cormack, and Rachel Blum. "Measuring Partisanship in Congressional Speech."

• Kelsey Shoub. Shifting Frames, Shifting Policy: How Discourse Influences Policy Change. Book project in progress.​

  • ​Does and why does policy discussion influence and inform policy decisions and outcomes?  I propose that the construction of policy discussion through the selection of frames shapes the considerations of those evaluating proposed policy changes. To describe the policy discussion, the frame set---the summary of the frames used to discussed the issue---can be examined. By focusing on the composition of the discussion, I shift the focus from the use of individual frames and their characteristics to the concept of the "frame set." Then I posit and show that as the frame set changes more, policy change is more likely to occur. To test these propositions, I first focus on policy change (i.e., bill passage) in Congress using machine learning and text analysis techniques to develop new measures of policy change and change in the frame set. This allows for a test within a specific venue of policy change and across policy areas. Then, I focus on a set of criminal justice areas --- the death penalty, immigration, and policing -- to show that the same, fundamental pattern is observed across venues and levels of government. Data for two of these chapters come from established studies that measure frames in distinct ways: Baumgartner, Deboef, and Boydstun's 2008 book and the Media Frames Corpus. This allows me to additionally show that these results are robust to how I measure frames on the Congressional floor.

​

OTHER WORK

• Olivella, Santiago and Kelsey Shoub. "Machine Learning in Political Science: Supervised Learning Models." Chapter in The Handbook of Research Methods in Political Science and International Relations. ed. Robert J Franzese Jr. & Luigi Curini in Sage's handbook series. 

• Baumgartner, Frank and Kelsey Shoub. "Population Dynamics and Representation." in The Organization Ecology of Interest Communities: Assessment and Agenda, eds. David Lowery, Virginia Gray, and Darren Halpin. London: Palgrave, 2015, pp 203-224.