This is part of Global Research Workshop Series: Developing an Interdisciplinary Research Platform Toward ‘Next Asia’ co-sponsored by Stanford Global Studies.

ABSTRACT of the research paper presented:

Who drives elite discourse on U.S.-China relations – Congress, the executive branch, or the media? Although prior research suggests that each actor may hold distinct agenda-setting capacities, their relative influence – and the directionality of influence among elites in foreign policy discourse – remains insufficiently theorized and empirically underexamined. This study investigates issue attention (what topics are discussed) and framing dynamics (how topics are discussed) surrounding China by analyzing communications from the legislative and executive branches alongside coverage from major U.S. media outlets. Drawing on unsupervised topic modeling and vector autoregression (VAR) models, we examine the evolution of issue attention and framing across two periods: the 116th Congress (January 3, 2019 – January 3, 2021) and the 118th Congress (January 3, 2023 – January 3, 2025). Our analysis disentangles the mechanisms of issue attention and framing and illustrates how partisan and individual-level differences structure elite-media interactions in the context of rising great power rivalry

Presenter: Xinru Ma, Research Scholar in the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab, Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University

Discussant: Pablo Barberá, Research Scientist in the Computational Social Science team at Meta; Adjunct Associate Professor in Political Science and International Relations, University of Southern California.

Discussant: Matthew Dolbow, Visiting Scholar at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.