Political wrangling over Critical Race Theory (CRT) in the United States has produced policies banning its teaching in jurisdictions across the country. However, laws touted as “anti-CRT” have little in common with the original, academic origins of the phrase. In this study, we use a Qualtrics-based survey experiment to assess how participants’ support for a ban will change depending on whether the ban reflects core tenets of academic researchers’ use of CRT, the phrase itself, or elements common to many of the laws intended to ban it. We find that these three different frames do indeed change support for such policies, and the effects are dependent upon partisanship. We interpret our results to be empirical evidence of the phrase “Critical Race Theory” complicating political discourse.

This paper traces the political development of Congressional gun control issue framing (with a specific focus from the early 1990s to the present), demonstrating that there have been two primary contexts in which gun control policy has been debated over this time frame: as a component of general crime control and as a specific response to mass shooting events. It identifies the primary historical, political, and electoral forces shaping the gun control debate in a given period while distinguishing the critical changes that drove the evolution from a crime control to a mass shooting focus. It assesses the degree of policy coherence and electoral salience specific to each context, illuminating why “gun control as crime control” had bipartisan Congressional support in the early 1990s and identifying what comparative disadvantages hinder the mass shooting focus of the present while also recognizing that the latter unfolded against a backdrop of heighted partisan polarization. The paper concludes that although one cannot compare the crime control and mass shooting framing contexts in a political vacuum, the electoral implications particular to each are relevant for understanding legislative action or inaction in Congress over the past thirty years, if more so in some periods than others.

The role of social media as a tool of mobilization, communication, and organization of social movements has been well documented since the Arab Spring. The public information posted on social media sites also presents researchers with a unique tool to study protests movements from within. The proposed study utilizes the theoretical foundation of issue framing literature and examines the social media framing of the Ukrainian Euromaidan protest movement. The original dataset traces the activities of the users on the social media site Facebook from 21 November 2013 to February 2014. While foreign media sources portrayed the Ukrainian crisis as a geopolitical struggle, the results of our analysis show that the participants of the protest conceptualized their movement in terms of domestic issues and an anti-regime revolution rather than a geopolitical crossroad between the EU and Russia. This study contributes to our understanding of the role social media sites play in the activities of protest movements, such as Euromaidan. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of social media as a tool of issue framing on par with the traditional sources of framing such as mass media and political elites.

The Bush administration has pursued a new, hard-line approach to the current nuclear standoff with North Korea. In efforts to build public support from the American public as well as from its allies in the region, the Bush administration has carefully framed, in distinctive ways, the nature of the crisis and the grounds for an appropriate response to North Korea's nuclear brinkmanship. To assess the effects of these U.S. messages designed to build public support for its hard-line approach, we conducted a short experimental study in the United States and in South Korea. Our results indicate that many of these messages induce diverging responses in the two countries, implying that the Bush administration's rhetoric designed to build domestic support does not have comparable effects in South Korea.