Constitutional framing: Content analysis of El Mercurio editorials on the Chilean Constitutional Convention (2021-2022)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26422/aucom.2026.1503.pizKeywords:
natural language processing, sentiment analysis, press, El Mercurio, Constitutional ConventionAbstract
This research quantitatively analyzes the editorial discourse of El Mercurio during the Chilean Constitutional Convention (2021-2022), in order to identify which frames predominated. A corpus of 229 editorials (the daily Editorial column and the weekly Semana Política) was examined using natural language processing (NLP) techniques, including topic modeling (BERTopic), sentiment analysis, and named entity recognition. The results, interpreted using Boydstun et al.'s (2013) framing typology, reveal a systematically critical stance: 67% of Editoriales and 98% of Semana Política showed negative sentiment. BERTopic identified 13 topics capturing polarized dichotomies of the constitutional debate (property vs. expropriation, presidentialism vs. parliamentarism, etc.). The dominant frames were Legality/Constitutionality, Economic, Crime and Punishment, and Political Factors. Greater visibility was given to external presidential figures (47.6% of mentions in Semana Política) than to constituent convention members (9.06%), which suggests a strategy of delegitimization by shifting the informational focus. This descriptive study constitutes the first systematic quantitative analysis of editorial discourse during the Chilean constitutional process using advanced NLP in Spanish. It offers a transferable methodological model and empirical evidence on framing strategies in processes of democratic transformation.
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