לילי בוקסמן-שבתאי, אוניברסיטת נורתווסטרן

Interpretive political polarization? A method to gauge opinion diversity in Facebook comments

Debates about political polarization in communication studies focus on media exposure, overlooking an important question: how polarized is the audience’s interpretation of the news? This paper presents an interpretive approach to political polarization and a procedure to analyze the diversity of opinions in Facebook comments on the news. The procedure starts with an inductive analysis of interpretive frames in comments. Conceptualizing comment threads as marketplaces of ideas, it then utilizes the Herfindahl-Hirschmann Index of market concentration to gauge levels of frame competitiveness. To demonstrate this procedure, the paper focuses on economic inequality, a topic at the center of political framing battles, using a story about a CEO who radically restructured compensation in his firm as a case study. Results suggest that there was a conservative-liberal divide in interpretation, but also patterns of mainstreaming and pluralism. Further applications of this analytical procedure in the study of public opinion are discussed.