A magic bullet in policy communication? On the ambiguous use of framing in policy research

ABSTRACT

Policy research and particularly social policy analysis have increasingly drawn upon the concept of framing. A number of contributions have demonstrated its usefulness for building explanations of policy change and its consequences. However, the adoption of the concept has also been accompanied by a considerable conceptual ambiguity. It is not only understood in quite different ways, at times its use is also rather vague and far removed from a narrow definition of framing. This paper discusses different ways in which framing is adopted within the field of policy research and the conceptual and epistemological stumbling blocks that follow from them. It argues that the most problematic use occurs where framing is used to characterize policy action and even more so in combination with public opinion changes that framing allegedly brought about. Finally, some ways forward for achieving a more rigorous use of the framing concept in policy research are presented.

KEYWORDS:

• Framing
• policy communication
• policy strategy
• content analysis
• public opinion

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. Thanks also go to Markus B. Siewert and Georg Wenzelburger for their feedback on previous versions of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Pascal D. König is researcher at the Institute of Political Science at the Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany. His research mainly deals with political communication, party competition, and policies regarding digital technologies. Recent work has appeared in Journal of European Public Policy, Party Politics, European Sociological Review, and Review of Policy Research.

Notes

1 This problem does not arise from a strictly constructivist perspective, of course, because it sees the presence of frames in communication inherently rooted in the subjective view of the interpreting individual (see e.g. Fischer 2003). Hence, the presence of a frame in communication, on the one hand, and the individual’s perspective, on the other hand, are seen as indivisible. While this makes falsifiable and comparative analyses of framing in communication difficult, interpretive policy analysis directly acknowledges the epistemological and methodological intricacies of analyzing meaning based on actions and specifically observable language use (Wagenaar 2015).

2 These elements are a problem definition, a causal attribution, a suggested solution and a moral evaluation.

3 Unless one sees the deservingness frame with regard to a policy as already containing at least a problem definition and a moral evaluation.

4 For instance, it might be a noteworthy feature in the policy communication of a government that it draws on the idea of national cohesion. However, this justification might be used frequently by many governments. It would hence be very important to know which weight that aspect has in the overall communication – which also means that it has to be clear how representative the analyzed material is.

5 Moreover, it should be noted that even the quantitative approach cannot do without some interpretative element. This is not only because the frame elements have to be coded in the text, but also because the extracted frames as bundles of elements have to be given denominations, which necessarily involves an interpretation (Tankard 2001, 89).

6 In existing research, framing largely takes the role as the independent variable. Similar challenges, however, occur when the interest lies on explaining framing seen as the dependent variable.