Meaning & Measurement Mini-Conference
Brian Steensland — Indiana University
bsteens@indiana.eduI teach at Indiana University, Bloomington and work in the areas of politics, culture and religion. In terms of meaning and measurement, the two areas I'm thinking a lot about right now (both related to politics) are (1) cultural analysis with a strong causal argument for the importance of meaning in politics, and (2) using public discourse from the media to track changes in political culture over time.
The first interest comes from my dialogue with the welfare state literature. The study of states and social policy is a virtual bastion of non-cultural modes of explanation. Most studies that might be viewed as cultural emphasize various dimensions of racial and gendered inequality. These are certainly important. But critics within the literature who are interested in strong causal arguments for explaining policy outcomes argue (correctly, for the most part) that such studies are either largely interpretive exercises in showing patterns or else (gasp) postmodern. In a study of welfare policy in the 1960s and 1970s that I'm writing up, I want to make the basic Weberian point that policy meanings, which are analogous to Weber's "world image," matter politically, and that these can be tracked in expert and public discourse through an ecological framework and shown to affect policy outcomes.
The second interest in public discourse comes from this welfare study and another that I'm doing with Paul DiMaggio, both of which attempt to systematically code the content of media discourse. For the welfare policy study, I did this using human coders on about 750 news articles. For a study about controversies over public arts funding, Paul and I are trying to computer automate this procedure to code about 10,000 newspaper articles. Two of many things we're interested in are "trope tracking" (over time and across media outlets) and the creation of issue synecdoche, the process through which an issue (federal arts funding) becomes political short-hand for a constellation of "related" social issues in the putative culture wars.