Sediments of Racism in Public Discourse: Operationalization, Empirical Assessment of its Occurrence and Effects

Research question/goal: 

In political communication research, racial discrimination in public discourse is receiving increasing attention. Yet, existing quantitative research often avoids focusing on the concept of racism directly, and measures only specific sub-dimensions of it (e.g. the stereotype content model). One explanation for this is that racism occurs as traces of a fragmented ideology in mediated discourse, with its different components hardly ever present within one individual mediated message. Based on a framework of 11 dimensions, the project develops an operationalization of racism in public discourse that covers all theoretically meaningful sub-dimensions of the concept using automated content analysis with adapter-based transformer models. A large, heterogeneous news corpus is used to benchmark these measures and give an empirical assessment of racism’s occurrence in the German public sphere. The project then maps different areas of the German mediated public sphere, analyzing in which combinations the message features under study occur in them. Subsequently experimental research is employed to test a media effects model that accounts for the fragmented nature of racism in media messages by drawing from priming and schema theory.

Fact sheet

Duration: 
2024 to 2027
Status: 
planned
Data Sources: 
Longitudinal corpus of German news content; experimental survey data
Geographic Space: 
Germany

Publications