Conflict or Strategy? Asymmetric Role Framing of La France insoumise and Rassemblement National in French News Headlines, 2022-2025

arXiv:2608.09936v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Do French news headlines frame left- and right-populist challengers as symmetric ``extremes,'' or as fundamentally different political adversaries? We examine 28,592 headlines about La France insoumise (LFI) and Rassemblement National (RN) published by 25 French-language outlets between 2022 and 2025, annotated through a three-model LLM pipeline validated against a stratified human audit. The clearest finding is role asymmetry rather than valence asymmetry: conflict framing and strategic-game framing are more robust across models and time than delegitimization, with AGGRESSOR serving as corroborating role syntax. LFI appears in headlines more often through a conflict register and RN through a strategic-electoral register. This role gap is direction-stable across all three annotation models, survives bootstrapping and permutation tests, and persists across outlet families and most of 2022-2025. A secondary moral-accounting layer (who is blamed, legitimized, or cast as a victim) is structured by outlet rather than party, producing aggregate nulls that conceal some of the corpus's most polarized patterns. Methodologically, the annotation pipeline reveals a two-tier reliability profile: conflict and strategic-game framing achieve the strongest human validation and cross-model stability; actor role is direction-stable but treated as corroborating because its audit reliability is lower; normative-judgment constructs (legitimacy, blame) are weaker. The paper contributes political-role assignment as a target for computational framing research that decomposes what valence-based measures conflate, and establishes a construct-stratified reliability framework for calibrating majority-vote LLM annotation pipelines in political text tasks.

Source: arXiv cs.CL | 2026-08-12

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