Moral Framing in Politics (MFiP): A new resource and models for moral framing

Rehbein, Ines; Reinig, Ines; Ponzetto, Simone Paolo

Abstract

The construct of morality permeates our entire lives and influences our behavior and how we perceive others. It therefore comes at no surprise that morality also plays an important role in politics, as morally framed arguments are perceived as more appealing and persuasive. Thus, being able to identify moral framing in political communication and to detect subtle differences in politicians’ moral framing can provide the basis for many interesting analyses in the political sciences. In the paper, we release MoralFramingInPolitics (MFiP), a new corpus of German parliamentary debates where the speakers’ moral framing has been coded, using the framework of Moral Foundations Theory (MFT). Our fine-grained annotations distinguish different types of moral frames and also include narrative roles, together with the moral foundations for each frame. We then present models for frame type and moral foundation classification and explore the benefits of data augmentation (DA) and contrastive learning (CL) for the two tasks. All data and code will be made available to the research community.