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Designing the Discourse Analysis
Abstract
This chapter presents the methods of data collection and analysis. Most importantly, the measurement and aggregation of the four discursive actions—going public, policy position-taking, valence attributing, and framing—are presented. Further, the research design in terms of the country and newspaper selection as well as the underlying concepts of discourse coalitions are discussed.
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This article considers the direct impact of political parties, interest groups, and social movement organizations (SMOs) on policy, providing evidence for a "core" hypothesis and three others that refine or qualify it. The core hypothesis: all three types of organizations have substantial impacts on policy. The other three: (1) when public opinion is taken into account, the political organizations do not have such an impact; (2) parties have a greater impact than interest groups and SMOs; and (3) interest groups and SMOs will affect policy only to the extent that their activities provide elected officials with information and resources relevant to their election campaigns. The source of data is articles published in major sociology and political science journals from 1990 to 2000, systematically coded to record the impact of organizations on policy. The major findings include: political organizations affect policy no more than half the time; parties and nonparty organizations affect policy about equally often; there is some evidence that organizational activities that respond to the electoral concerns of elected officials are especially likely to have an impact.
List of Figures ix List of Tables xi Preface xiii CHAPTER ONE Problems of Institutional Analysis 1 CHAPTER TWO The Problem of Change 31 CHAPTER THREE The Problem of Mechanisms 62 CHAPTER FOUR The Problem of Ideas 90 CHAPTER FIVE The Problem of Globalization 124 CHAPTER SIX Where Do W Go from Here? 172 APPENDIX Analysis of Tax Levels and Structures for Country Subgroups 191 References 205 Index 239
Tables and figures Foreword Friedhelm Neidhardt Preface Glossary Part I. Introduction: 1. Two related stories 2. Historical context 3. Methods Part II. Major Outcomes: 4. The discursive opportunity structure 5. Standing 6. Framing Part III. Representing Different Constituencies: 7. Representing women's claims 8. Representing religious claims 9. Representing the tradition of the left Part IV. The Quality of Abortion Discourse: 10. Normative criteria for the public sphere 11. Measuring the quality of discourse 12. Metatalk 13. Lessons for democracy and the public sphere Methodological appendix References Index.
This article responds to key methodological and theoretical challenges posed by the literature on the role of ideas in international relations, especially the literature on ideas and the end of the Cold War. The article develops a theoretical framework that guides the analysis of the empirical articles that follow. It identifies explanatory strategies for the role of ideas and seeks to clarify key methodological issues in the study of ideas. The article defines terms, identifies several different relationships between ideational and material factors, and lays out a series of "tests" for evaluating the causal effect of various kinds of ideas and ideational mechanisms. It then seeks to clarify two primary issues: whether it is possible to draw a clearer line between the material and the ideational; and what is meant by "constitutive effects" and "constitutive explanation." The article defends the notion of constitutive explanation and shows how both causal analysis and constitutive analysis are valid explanatory strategies for the role of ideas.
1. Theoretical Perspective: Social Forces and the Struggle Over European Order 2. Global Restructuring, Transnational Capitalism and Rival Projects for European Order 3. The European Roundtable: an Elite Forum of Europe's Emergent Transnational Capitalist Class 4. The Roundtable's Changing Strategic Project and the Transnational Struggle over European Order 5. Transnational Class Agency, the Rise of 'Embedded Neo-Liberalism' and the Evolving European Order References
This large-scale study investigates how intermedia agenda-setting effects are moderated by five factors: (1) lag length; (2) medium type; (3) language/institutional barriers; (4) issue type; and (5) election or non-election context. Longitudinal analyses of daily attention to twenty-five issues in nine Belgian media across eight years demonstrate that (1) intermedia agenda setting is mainly a short-term process; (2) newspapers have stronger influence on television than vice versa; (3) language/institutional barriers suppress influence; (4) size of influence differs across types of issues; and (5) intermedia agenda setting is largely absent during election times.
To what extent do stakeholders in a conflict over natural resources interact with actors of congruent policy core beliefs or with actors who have perceived influence? The response to this question is structured principally by the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) using questionnaire and interview data collected from stakeholders involved in California Marine Protected Area policy. The findings indicate that shared beliefs are the best predictor for policy network relationships, supporting the ACF. Perceived influence, while less important than shared beliefs, is another significant predictor.
List of tables List of figures Preface Part I. The News Media and Civic Malaise: 1. The news media and democracy 2. Evaluating media performance 3. Understanding political communications Part II. Trends in Political Communication: 4. The decline of newspapers? 5. The rise (and fall?) of the television age 6. The emerging internet era 7. The evolution of campaign communications 8. The rise of the post-modern campaign? Part III. The Impact on Democracy: 9. Negative news, negative public? 10. Knows little? Information and choice 11. Cares less? Cynical media, cynical public? 12. Stays home? Political mobilization 13. American exceptionalism? 14. A virtuous circle? Technical appendix Notes Select bibliography Author index Subject index.
The study of campaigning activities has long been neglected in political science (Farrell 1996; Schmitt-Beck/Farrell 2002). The disregard of campaigning can be explained by the fact that it has long been taken for granted that campaigns only have minimal effects. More recent studies have challenged this ‘minimal effect’ view of campaign effects. Indeed, Iyengar and Simon (2000) maintain that campaigns do matter and can be pivotal. Similarly, several recent studies (Nadeau et al. 2001; Lachat/Sciarini 2002; Fournier et al. 2004 or Holbrook/McGlurg 2005) provide evidence for substantial and systematic campaign effects on citizens’ voting behaviour. Increasingly, campaigns are viewed as playing a key role for the information processing of the citizens, providing voters with the necessary information for making a choice in line with their preexisting preferences (Finkel 1993; Gelman/King 1993; Stimson 2004; Arceneaux 2005). However, the analysis of campaigns by political scientists has been focusing on the voters, while little attention has so far been paid to the campaign strategies of political actors. The field of campaigning has been left to political consultants and political marketing specialists. In this paper, we would like to make a contribution to the conceptualization of the campaign strategies of political actors.
In 2005, the European Parliament rejected the directive ‘on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions’, which had been drafted and supported by the European Commission, the Council and well-organised industrial interests, with an overwhelming majority. In this unusual case, a coalition of opponents of software patents prevailed over a strong industry-led coalition. In this article, an explanation is developed based on political discourse showing that two stable and distinct discourse coalitions can be identified and measured over time. The apparently weak coalition of software patent opponents shows typical properties of a hegemonic discourse coalition. It presents itself as being more coherent, employs a better-integrated set of frames and dominates key economic arguments, while the proponents of software patents are not as well-organised. This configuration of the discourse gave leeway for an alternative course of political action by the European Parliament. The notion of discourse coalitions and related structural features of the discourse are operationalised by drawing on social network analysis. More specifically, discourse network analysis is introduced as a new methodology for the study of policy debates. The approach is capable of measuring empirical discourses both statically and in a longitudinal way, and is compatible with the policy network approach.
Through the analysis of Hungarian politics, this article demonstrates how parties become embedded in the social, cognitive and emotive structures of societies. The role of agency in cleavage formation is addressed, with a special emphasis on the mechanism through which political parties structure their environments. Next to the popularization of conflict perceptions and the consolidation of camp identities, the development of a more elaborate and segmented organizational structure is identified as an integral part of the process of cleavage formation. Such a structure enables parties to forge coalitions among previously separate social groupings and combine group interests into packages large enough to overcome institutional thresholds of power. The findings indicate that parties are potentially able to cross cleavage lines, re-structure relations within the party system and create new associations between party preferences, socio-structural categories and attitudes. Furthermore, parties seem to be able to alter the relationships between psychologically rooted attitudes and social categories. The study also shows, however, that deep-seated socio-cultural divides limit the power of agency even in new democracies.
The newest new institutionalism, discursive institutionalism, lends insight into the role of ideas and discourse in politics while providing a more dynamic approach to institutional change than the older three new institutionalisms. Ideas are the substantive content of discourse. They exist at three levels - policies, programs, and philosophies - and can be categorized into two types, cognitive and normative. Discourse is the interactive process of conveying ideas. It comes in two forms: the coordinative discourse among policy actors and the communicative discourse between political actors and the public. These forms differ in two formal institutional contexts; simple polities have a stronger communicative discourse and compound polities a stronger coordinative discourse. The institutions of discursive institutionalism, moreover, are not external-rule-following structures but rather are simultaneously structures and constructs internal to agents whose "background ideational abilities" within a given "meaning context" explain how institutions are created and exist and whose foreground discursive abilities, following a logic of communication, explain how institutions change or persist. Interests are subjective ideas, which, though real, are neither objective nor material. Norms are dynamic, intersubjective constructs rather than static structures.
We review the meaning of the concept of framing, approaches to studying framing, and the effects of framing on public opinion. After defining framing and framing effects, we articulate a method for identifying frames in communication and a psychological model for understanding how such frames affect public opinion. We also discuss the relationship between framing and priming, outline future research directions, and describe the normative implications of framing.
Many have argued that the success of European integration is predicated on reinforcing market structures and some have gone further to state that the creation of a transnational market results in a decoupling of markets from their national political and social frameworks, thus threatening to unravel historical social bargains. Drawing on the work of Karl Polanyi and John Ruggie and using their insights regarding the social embedding of markets, we dissent from this view by examining how the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has handled a key sector of the emerging European market—labor mobility. We argue that rather than disembedding markets, decisions of the ECJ—just as Polanyi and Ruggie would have predicted—activate new social and political arrangements. We find evidence for the development of a new legal and political structure, largely inspired by the Court but also imbricated in European Union legislation, at the regional level.
The prevailing model of international economic regimes is strictly positivistic in its epistemological orientation and stresses the distribution of material power capabilities in its explanatory logic. It is inadequate to account for the current set of international economic regimes and for the differences between past and present regimes. The model elaborated here departs from the prevailing view in two respects, while adhering to it in a third. First, it argues that regimes comprise not simply what actors say and do, but also what they understand and find acceptable within an intersubjective framework of meaning. Second, it argues that in the economic realm such a framework of meaning cannot be deduced from the distribution of material power capabilities, but must be sought in the configuration of state-society relations that is characteristic of the regime-making states. Third, in incorporating these notions into our understanding of the formation and transformation of international economic regimes, the formulation self-consciously strives to remain at the systemic level and to avoid becoming reductionist in attributing cause and effect relations. The article can therefore argue that the prevailing view is deficient on its own terms and must be expanded and modified. Addressing the world of actual international economic regimes, the article argues that the pax Britannica and the pax Americana cannot be equated in any meaningful sense, and that the postwar regimes for money and trade live on notwithstanding premature announcements of their demise.
This book explains the contrasting strategies and their electoral fortunes of social democratic parties in the major European democracies in the 1970s and 1980s. Going beyond approaches that focus on the influence of class structure and political economic institutions, The Transformation of European Social Democracy analyses the party's competitive situation in the electoral arena, the constraints and opportunities of party organisation, and the role of ideological legacies to explain the strategic choices social democratic parties have made and the electoral results they have achieved. Far from being doomed to decline, social democracy's success depends on its ability to transform its political message and to construct new electoral coalitions.
This book outlines a new approach to the analysis of decision making based on "cognitive maps." A cognitive map is a graphic representation intended to capture the structure of a decision maker's stated beliefs about a particular problem. Following introductory chapters that develop the theory and techniques of cognitive mapping, a set of five empirical studies applies these new techniques to five policy areas. Originally published in 1976. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
This introductory chapter first sets out the purpose of the book, which is to bring together scattered pieces of knowledge and offer social scientists a critical assessment of the theoretical and empirical issues raised by the ever-expanding social science literature on ideas and politics. Ranging across several fields of political science and sociology (American politics, comparative politics, international relations, political economy, political sociology, and public policy), the book documents central themes in the burgeoning literature on ideas and politics, while offering critical analyses to guide future social science research. It pays considerable attention to showing how ideas shape political behavior and outcomes and how focusing on ideas provides richer explanations of politics. The chapter then discusses the development of ideational research and presents an overview of the subsequent chapters.
Having illustrated how party competition can take the form of selective emphasis on issues, as demonstrated by the 1929 General Election in Britain, the author looks at the two alternative views of competition, namely selective emphases versus opposing preferences. British manifestos and American platforms are analysed in terms of selective emphases on issues, and the chapter concludes by assessing the effects of selective emphases on party victory and defeat, and consequently on party strategy.-J.Sheail
The empirical evidence concerning the ‘personalization of politics' thesis is, at best, mixed. The analysis of a new data-set on the media coverage of national elections in six Western European countries serves to reinforce this overall rather sceptical conclusion. The analysis shows that, in the national elections in the six countries covered (Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom [UK]), there is no general trend to increasing personalization or increasing concentration of the media coverage on a limited set of particularly visible personalities. Among the six countries, the exception to this overall assessment is the Netherlands, where we find both a trend towards increasing personalization and increasing concentration of the public attention on a limited set of personalities. Rather than an increasing level of personalization, what we generally observe are large country-specific differences in the overall degree of personalization and of the concentration of attention on the top candidates.
In order to assess the EU's ‘normative power', the article compares the justification of the EU's external policy regarding the death penalty and minority protection, respectively. Starting from the assumption that policies can be justified by utility- , value- or rights-based arguments, it reasons that in complex argumentations all types are deployed, so that coherence between different justifications is an important legitimizing factor. In the death penalty case, EU policy developed in line with the requirements of argumentative coherence, while in the case of minority protection, the shift from utility- to value-based arguments exposed incoherence between the internal and external application of the policy. This incoherence triggered a discursive ‘realignment strategy', linking the external policy back to established EU norms. However, this does not suspend the tension between the different internal and external approaches to minority protection, thereby diminishing the EU's normative power in this issue area.
Recent studies have started to use media data to measure party positions and issue salience. The aim of this article is to compare and cross-validate this alternative approach with the more commonly used party manifestos, expert judgments and mass surveys. To this purpose, we present two methods to generate indicators of party positions and issue salience from media coverage: the core sentence approach and political claims analysis. Our cross-validation shows that with regard to party positions, indicators derived from the media converge with traditionally used measurements from party manifestos, mass surveys and expert judgments, but that salience indicators measure different underlying constructs. We conclude with a discussion of specific research questions for which media data offer potential advantages over more established methods.
Among the many applications in social science for the entry and management of data, there are only a few software packages that apply natural language processing to identify semantic concepts such as issue categories or political statements by actors. Although these procedures usually allow efficient data collection, most have difficulty in achieving sufficient accuracy because of the high complexity and mutual relationships of the variables used in the social sciences. To address these flaws, we suggest a (semi-)automatic annotation approach that implements an innovative coding method (Core Sentence Analysis) by computational linguistic techniques (mainly entity recognition, concept identification, and dependency parsing). Although such computational linguistic tools have been readily available for quite a long time, social scientists have made astonishingly little use of them. The principal aim of this paper is to gather data on party-issue relationships from newspaper articles. In the first stage, we try to recognize relations between parties and issues with a fully automated system. This recognition is extensively tested against manually annotated data of the coverage in the boulevard newspaper Blick of the Swiss national parliamentary elections of 2003 and 2007. In the second stage, we discuss possibilities for extending our approach, such as by enriching these relations with directional measures indicating their polarity.
Globalization is widely held to circumscribe the parameters of political and economic choice in contemporary Europe, just as it has come to circumscribe the parameters of debate on the future of European models of capitalism. Yet opinions on the question of convergence nonetheless vary markedly, with proponents of the hyperglobalization thesis pointing to a simple and inexorable process of neoliberal convergence while an increasingly influential school of neo-institutionalists point to a rather more complex process of ‘dual’ or ‘co-convergence’, reinforcing the distinctiveness of liberal and coordinated market economies. In both accounts, the exhibited pattern of convergence (dual or otherwise) is seen to be driven by globalization. In this paper I provide a theoretical and empirical critique of this important literature, challenging the contextualization of the question of convergence with respect to globalization which both perspectives share. I advance a distinctive variant of the new institutionalism which emphasizes: (i) the contingency of any process of convergence observed; (ii) the frequently political as opposed to economic nature of convergent tendencies; (iii) the counter-tendencies which might be mobilized to such tendencies; and (iv) the invariably far greater significance, in the establishment of common trajectories, of regional rather than genuinely global processes of integration. Though common trajectories are discernible within contemporary Europe, associated in particular with the institutional architecture of EMU and an accelerating process of European economic integration, they have been embraced more or less enthusiastically and at variable paces, leading not to convergent but to divergent outcomes.
Contemporary theories of politics tend to portray politics as a reflection of society, political phenomena as the aggregate consequences of individual behavior, action as the result of choices based on calculated self-interest, history as efficient in reaching unique and appropriate outcomes, and decision making and the allocation of resources as the central foci of political life. Some recent theoretical thought in political science, however, blends elements of these theoretical styles into an older concern with institutions. This new institutionalism emphasizes the relative autonomy of political institutions, possibilities for inefficiency in history, and the importance of symbolic action to an understanding of politics. Such ideas have a reasonable empirical basis, but they are not characterized by powerful theoretical forms. Some directions for theoretical research may, however, be identified in institutionalist conceptions of political order. This is precisely the objective of the present article.
Party competition for votes in free and fair elections involves complex interactions by multiple actors in political landscapes that are continuously evolving, yet classical theoretical approaches to the subject leave many important questions unanswered. Here Michael Laver and Ernest Sergenti offer the first comprehensive treatment of party competition using the computational techniques of agent-based modeling. This exciting new technology enables researchers to model competition between several different political parties for the support of voters with widely varying preferences on many different issues. Laver and Sergenti model party competition as a true dynamic process in which political parties rise and fall, a process where different politicians attack the same political problem in very different ways, and where today's political actors, lacking perfect information about the potential consequences of their choices, must constantly adapt their behavior to yesterday's political outcomes. Party Competition shows how agent-based modeling can be used to accurately reflect how political systems really work. It demonstrates that politicians who are satisfied with relatively modest vote shares often do better at winning votes than rivals who search ceaselessly for higher shares of the vote. It reveals that politicians who pay close attention to their personal preferences when setting party policy often have more success than opponents who focus solely on the preferences of voters, that some politicians have idiosyncratic "valence" advantages that enhance their electability--and much more.
The analysis of public policy has recently been characterized by the development of an approach which emphasizes the influence of cognitive and normative elements in public policy - making. The main purpose of this article is to offer a critical review of different models related to this approach, based on notions of paradigm, of advocacy coalition , or of the référentiel . In spite of some differences, these conceptualizations all shed light on the influence of 'world views', mechanisms of identity formation, principles of action in public policy analysis. These models, separate from those informed by a rationalist position, are also capable of explaining the processes of 'extraordinary' change in public policy. However,an excessive emphasis on cognitive and normative variables has sometimes underestimated the forms of mobilization to which these frames are subject. This article tries to integrate certain neglected variables: the interests of actors, and the role of institutions.
This study explores the role of candidate news releases, media content, and public opinion in shaping the salience of political issues and candidate images during the 2002 Florida gubernatorial election. The study analyzed 77 news releases, 654 newspaper stories, and public opinion data from a statewide survey of 572 respondents. Significant correlations were found supporting both first- and second-level agenda building and agenda-setting effects. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.
The past decade has witnessed a resurgence of regionalism in world politics. Old regionalist organizations have been revived, new organizations formed, and regionalism and the call for strengthened regionalist arrangements have been central to many of the debates about the nature of the post-Cold War international order. The number, scope and diversity of regionalist schemes have grown significantly since the last major ‘regionalist wave’ in the 1960s. Writing towards the end of this earlier regionalist wave, Joseph Nye could point to two major classes of regionalist activity: on the one hand, micro-economic organizations involving formal economic integration and characterized by formal institutional structures; and on the other, macro-regional political organizations concerned with controlling conflict. Today, in the political field, regional dinosaurs such as the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and the Organization of American States (OAS) have re-emerged. They have been joined both by a large number of aspiring micro-regional bodies (such as the Visegrad Pact and the Pentagonale in central Europe; the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU) and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in the Middle East; ECOWAS and possibly a revived Southern African Development Community (SADC, formerly SADCC) led by post-apartheid South Africa in Africa), and by loosely institutionalized meso-regional security groupings such as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE, now OSCE) and more recently the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF). In the economic field, micro-regional schemes for economic cooperation or integration (such as the Southern Cone Common Market, Mercosur , the Andean Pact, the Central American Common Market (CACM) and CARICOM in the Americas; the attempts to expand economic integration within ASEAN; and the proliferation of free trade areas throughout the developing world) stand together with arguments for macro-economic or ‘bloc regionalism’ built around the triad of an expanded European Union (EU), the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) and some further development of Asia-Pacific regionalism. The relationship between these regional schemes and between regional and broader global initiatives is central to the politics of contemporary regionalism.
This article analyses how political parties frame European integration, and gauges the consistency of their argumentation. Over the course of investigation, one can see how actors' positions are justified, and how the European Union is perceived (i.e., what forces give rise to Euroscepticism and Europeanism). It is argued here that the parties' framing of issues depends on the interests they traditionally defend at the national level, their general positions on European integration, and whether or not they belong to the established political actors in their respective countries. The coding approach enables the relation of frames to actors and positions, moving beyond the techniques employed by existing studies that analyse the media presentation of European integration. Sophisticated frame categorisations are provided to capture the complex structure of argumentation, going beyond a simple dichotomy of economic and cultural frames. Relying on a large and original media dataset covering the period 2004–2006, six Western European countries are investigated.
This article examines scales of Left/Right and Progressive/Conservative positioning of political parties to assess the relative internal and external validity of expert-driven data vis-à-vis document-based data. First, I discuss issues of conceptual travelling and conceptual stretching. Second, I assess the internal validity of the expert- and document-driven scales. It appears that there is indeed a difference between expert and document driven scaling. Thirdly, I examine external validity by comparing different scales in relation to various political variables. The analysis shows that the scales, when used as variables in comparative political research, produce different effects. The conclusion is that – in addition to internal validity problems – the external validity of scaled variables generated from different types of data needs to be assessed more carefully than is often the case in comparative politics.
THE HISTORY OF THE CONCEPTTHE ENGLISH CONTEXTINTERPRETATION OF THE MERCANTILIST DOCTRINEPOWER AND PROTECTIONTHE LATER HISTORY OF MERCANTILISMPROTECTION AND UNDERDEVELOPMENT
INTRODUCTIONSOCIALISM BEFORE MARX, 1800–50STATE SOCIALISM, 1850–1945LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM, 1850–1945THE LANGE CONTROVERSY, 1908–89EUROPEAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY AFTER 1945SELF-MANAGED SOCIALISM AFTER 1945PLAN AND MARKET, 1953–89AFTER THE FALL: SOCIALIST ECONOMICS SINCE 1989
This article proposes that Goffman's Frame Analysis can be interpreted as a step toward unpacking the idea of context. His analysis implies a recursive model involving frames within frames. The key problem is that neither Goffman nor anyone else has clearly defined what is meant by a frame. I propose that it can be represented by a word, phrase, or proposition. A subjective context can be represented as an assembly of these items, joined together by operators such as and, since, if, not, and then. Furthermore, this model can be combined with the recursive levels of mutual awareness in earlier approaches to consensus. The combination would represent the intersubjective context: it can be used to find the minimum amount of background that would allow consensual interpretations of discourse. It could also construct a chain that links discourse to the institutional level, the micro-macro pathway from word and gesture to social structure. Goffman hinted that mathematical notation might be used to represent a frame assembly. By adding levels of awareness to such notation, it could represent social facts. Because the use of vernacular words rather than concepts is a problem in social science, Goffman's approach has a general as well as a particular significance.
It is widely accepted that democracies are less conflict prone, if only with other democracies. Debate persists, however, about the causes underlying liberal peace. This article offers a contrarian account based on liberal political economy. Economic development, free markets, and similar interstate interests all anticipate a lessening of militarized disputes or wars. This “capitalist peace” also accounts for the effect commonly attributed to regime type in standard statistical tests of the democratic peace.
As a method specifically intended for the study of messages, content analysis is fundamental to mass communication research. Intercoder reliability, more specifically termed intercoder agreement, is a measure of the extent to which independent judges make the same coding decisions in evaluating the characteristics of messages, and is at the heart of this method. Yet there are few standard and accessible guidelines available regarding the appropriate procedures to use to assess and report intercoder reliability, or software tools to calculate it. As a result, it seems likely that there is little consistency in how this critical element of content analysis is assessed and reported in published mass communication studies. Following a review of relevant concepts, indices, and tools, a content analysis of 200 studies utilizing content analysis published in the communication literature between 1994 and 1998 is used to characterize practices in the field. The results demonstrate that mass communication researchers often fail to assess (or at least report) intercoder reliability and often rely on percent agreement, an overly liberal index. Based on the review and these results, concrete guidelines are offered regarding procedures for assessment and reporting of this important aspect of content analysis.