Reality or Rhetoric? : Between-Group Inequality and the Use of Grievance Frames on Social Media

Abstract

The concept of a group grievance—the unjust deprivation of a group relative to some real or imagined standard—plays a crucial role in theories of ethnic conflict. These theories expect group elites to frame a given situation as unjust, thereby motivating behavioral responses among group members seeking to remedy the injustice. To date, however, no large-N study has analyzed how elites communicate grievances. Small-N studies have looked at communication, but we do not know whether results generalize. This article introduces novel data that track the presence of grievance frames in approx. 646,000 social media posts of 225 ethnic organizations world-wide and in four global languages (English, French, Russian and Spanish). Analyzing the relationship between structural inequalities and grievance frames in ethnic organizations’ online communication, we find that grievance frames (1) are rarely used in social media posts, and (2) track real-world political, but not economic inequalities between ethnic groups.