Mapping Morality Framing in Lithuanian Parliamentary Debates of 1990-2020

Studies of morality policies and issues (such as, abortion, drug and alcohol consumption, stem cell research or gambling) framing are rather popular in media and political communication studies (see, for example, some recent studies Studlar, Burns, 2015; Mucciaroni, Ferraiolo, Rubado, 2019). However, morality and moral considerations underlie various political attitudes, values, identities and debates, more generally (Clifford, Jerit, 2013). Therefore, morality framing is among the most important frames in political and media discourse (Boydstun, Glazier, Pietryka, 2013; Card et al. 2015). Moreover, policies and policy issues become “moralized” and “demoralized” over time (Kreitzer, Kane, Mooney, 2019) and there are certain actors that are more inclined to “moralize” policy issues that others (Kreitzer, Kane, Mooney, 2019). Still, there are little studies that analyze morality framing of policy issues from temporal and comparative perspective. In this paper we aim to investigate how morality framing was used by Lithuanian politicians in legislative debates. First, we develop a supervised machine-learning approach (Jurka et al., 2013) for identifying morality frames within Lithuanian political discourse using manually coded texts retrieved from the political campaign debates and parliamentary floor debates. Then, we apply it to the legislative debates of the Lithuanian parliament (the Seimas) starting from 1990 and spanning to 2020. We investigate three major aspects of morality framing: 1) which political actors (governmental vs. opposition, populist vs. mainstream parties) use the morality frame more frequently, 2) which policy issues (just “morality policies” or other issues, too) are framed more frequently with the morality frame, and 3) how (if) morality framing changes over time (whether there are issues that are always framed with the morality frame when they get on the agenda of the Parliament (like “morality policies”), or the use of the morality frame fluctuates over time). References: Boydstun, A.E, Glazier, R.A., Pietryka, M.T. (2013). Playing to the Crowd: Agenda Control in Presidential Debates. Political Communication, 30(2): 254-277. Card, D., Boydstun, A.E, Gross, J.H., Resnik, P., Smith, N.A. (2015). The Media Frames Corpus: Annotations of Frames Across Issues. In Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pp. 438-444. Association for Computational Linguistics. Clifford, S., Jerit, J. (2013). How Words Do the Work of Politics: Moral Foundations Theory and the Debate over Stem Cell Research. The Journal of Politics, 75(3): 659-671. Jurka, T.P., Collingwood, L., Boydstun, A.E, Grossman, E., van Atteveldt. W. (2013). RTextTools: A Supervised Learning Package for Text Classification. The R Journal, 5(1): 6-12. Kreitzer, R.J., Kane, K.A., Mooney, C.Z. (2019). The Evolution of Morality Policy Debate: Moralization and Demoralization. The Forum, 17(1): 3-24. Mucciaroni, G., Ferraiolo, K., Rubado, M.E. (2019). Framing morality policy issues: state legislative debates on abortion restrictions. Policy Sciences, 52(2): 171-189. Ruzza, C., Salgado R.S. (2021). The populist turn in EU politics and the intermediary role of civil society organisations. European Politics and Society, 22(4): 471-485. Studlar, D.T., Burns, G.J. (2015). Toward the permissive society? Morality policy agendas and policy directions in Western democracies. Policy Sciences, 48(3): 273-291.