Quantifying the ideational context: political frames, meaning trajectories and punctuated equilibria in Spanish mainstream press during the Catalan nationalist challenge

This article presents a quantitative method for mapping semantic spaces and tracing political frames' trajectories, that facilitate the analysis of the connections between changes in ideas and socio-political phenomena. We test our approach in Spain, where the Catalan conflict fostered a competition in terms of decontestation of meanings of key political concepts. Using unsupervised machine learning, we track the salience, level of semantic fragmentation and fluctuations in meanings of 216 frames in the two largest Spanish newspapers, El Pais and El Mundo, throughout 8 years. This is achieved via the extraction, vectorization, and comparison of over 70,000 words. We apply Latent Semantic Analysis, an innovative methodology for the alignment of semantic spaces, and new institutional theory. Our exploratory study suggests that the evolution of many nationalism-related frames resembles a punctuated equilibrium model, and that political events in Catalonia, acted as critical junctures, altering the meanings reflected in the Spanish press.

Automated summary

This article presents a quantitative method for mapping semantic spaces and tracing the trajectories of political frames, allowing the analysis of the relationship between changes in ideas and socio-political phenomena. The study focuses on Spain and examines the Catalan conflict, which led to a competition in redefining the meanings of key political concepts. Through unsupervised machine learning, the research tracks the salience, level of semantic fragmentation, and fluctuations in meanings of 216 frames in the two major Spanish newspapers over an 8-year period. The findings suggest that the evolution of many nationalism-related frames follows a punctuated equilibrium model, with political events in Catalonia acting as critical junctures that shape the meanings portrayed in the Spanish press.