Regula Hänggli

Key factors in frame building: how strategic political actors shape news media coverage

In this article, the author focuses on the relationship between political actors and the mass media. The author uses media frames as dependent variables and investigates the factors that influence the presence and frequency of frames applied by journalists (the frames in “news media”). This has come to be known as frame building. The author argues that there are at least three important factors in frame building: power, the salience of the frames in the media input, and the multiplication effect of the minister. Using data from content analyses of campaign material and news media and from interviews with political actors, the author finds support that for frame presence, power is important. For frame frequency, the salience of the frames in the media input and the minister are crucial.

Frame Construction and Frame Promotion (Strategic Framing Choices)

In this article, the authors discuss the three most important strategic framing choices by political actors (“substantive emphasis choice,” “oppositional emphasis choice,” and “contest emphasis choice”) of direct-democratic campaigns. The authors investigate these strategic framing choices in the media input and look at how the political actors change their choices in another communication channel (political advertisement) and over time. The results provide the following insights: First, political actors tend to emphasize one to two main frames in their media input. They generally also use their main frames in the political advertisements and stay on their main frames over time. Second, although political actors tend to emphasize their own frames, they do not exclusively revert to this behavior. The authors find that the political actors pay more attention to their opponents’ frames in the media input than in the ads. With regard to variation over time, the authors can state that campaign dialogue does not disappear over the course of the campaign. Third, framing is primarily accomplished in substantive terms. In the advertisements and toward the end of the campaign, the authors do not find more contest frames.

Agenda Building and Setting in a Referendum Campaign: Investigating the Flow of Arguments among Campaigners, the Media, and the Public:

This study tests second-level agenda-building and -setting effects in the course of a referendum campaign. Personal standardized interviews with forty-seven different campaign managers and a content analysis of campaign material are linked to a content analysis of TV and newspaper coverage and a three-wave public opinion survey. The results demonstrate the dynamic flow of arguments in the agenda-building and -setting process: top-down from the campaigners to the news media and the public.

Partisan choices in a direct-democratic campaign

Ever since Lazarsfeld and his colleagues’ (1944) seminal study, it has become common wisdom that election campaigns, if anything, serve the activation of voters’ fundamental predispositions. However, disagreement emerges on the role of partisan orientations. Although some authors consider them as fundamental predispositions, which are activated during the campaign and subsequently act as filters for incoming information, others argue that party attachments are simple running tallies of political assessments, which are constantly updated in response to campaign events, or decision shortcuts for voters innocent of substantial information. In this study, we scrutinize the role of partisan orientations in a direct-democratic campaign using data from a panel survey fielded during the run-up to the 2006 Swiss asylum law referendum. We find that, as voters accumulate knowledge in the course of the campaign, vote intentions dramatically converge on pre-campaign partisan orientations. Moreover, voters, whose earlier issue-specific and partisan orientations collide, tend to resolve their ambivalence in favour of their partisan leanings. These results corroborate the view of partisanship as a fundamental predisposition.

The Effects of Repetitive News Framing on Political Opinions over Time

This study tests how repeated exposure to the same news frame influences political opinions over time. In a survey experiment (N = 296), we repeatedly exposed participants to the same news frame (at the start of the study, after one day, one week, and two weeks) and measured effects on opinions (at the start, after two weeks, and after six weeks). Participants in a control group were exposed only once and the effect was also traced over time. Results show that repetitive framing leads both to stronger and more persistent effects than single exposure. The persistence effects are most evident for individuals with moderate political knowledge. Our study contributes to a more comprehensive model of framing effects in mass communication experiments.

Key Factors in Frame Building

In this chapter, we focus on the relationship between political actors and the mass media. We use media frames as dependent variables and investigate the processes that influence the creation or changes of frames applied by journalists (the frames in ‘news media’). This has come to be known as ‘frame building’ (Scheufele 1999). These mechanisms have been largely neglected so far. This chapter first explores the ability of political actors to use their media input to influence media frames, and investigates whether the relationship between political actors and journalists is reciprocal or unidirectional. Based on the assumption that media input by political actors influences news media frames, the chapter then looks at the factors in more detail, with particular emphasis on the influence of power, the salience of frames in media input, and the multiplication effect of the minister (i.e. the Federal Councillor).

The Charm of Salient Issues? Parties’ Strategic Behavior in Press Releases

During election campaigns political actors strategically choose issues to focus on. Besides highlighting issues over which a party exerts issue ownership, they may also engage with issues highly salient in the media. The present chapter analyses under which conditions parties prefer focusing on the issues they own, and in which cases they rather pay attention to issues on the media agenda. A content analysis of press releases and newspaper coverage in Switzerland, Germany, France and Great Britain during national election campaigns shows that issue ownership matters across countries and explains quite well the parties’ issue selection strategies. However, exogenous events like crisis, scandals or catastrophes motivate to follow up on news coverage, even at the cost of owned issues.

Design of the Study: An Integrated Approach

In the recent decades different complementary approaches to capturing the effects of political campaigns have been offered (for an overview see Brady and Johnston 2006; Goldstein and Ridout 2004, Iyengar and Simon 2000). Without doubt, one of the strongest approaches to investigating the effects of mediated political campaigns is the analysis of longitudinal data from panel designs (e.g. Bartels 2006). However, even studies relying on panel data are plagued with the problem of drawing causal inferences about campaign effects because little is known about the content of the press releases, the political advertisements or the news media. This shortcoming is addressed in the present study by using an integrated approach. We explicitly attempt to integrate data collection and data analyses of the strategies of political and media actors an analysis of their impact on the opinion formation of voters. Figure 1.1 in Chapter 1 illustrates the integrated design of the present study: It highlights the three types of actors involved in the political communication process – politicians, the news media and citizens – and the decisions and processes taking place at the site of each one of these actors, as well as the sets of reciprocal processes linking each pair of them.

Construction of the Frames

In this chapter we look at how political actors craft their messages in terms of framing. Frames are ‘central organizing ideas that provide coherence to a designated set of idea elements’ (Ferree et al. 2002: 105). A frame is like ‘a picture frame, it puts a border around something, distinguishing it from what is around it’; it is a ‘spotlight’ that attracts our attention to certain aspects of an issue, and directs it away from other aspects (Gamson 2004: 245). According to Entman’s (1993: 52) influential definition, to frame is to selectively emphasize/evaluate certain aspects of a perceived reality and to make them more salient, ‘in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described’. In other words, to frame is to actively construct the meaning of the reality in question. For instance, in the case of capital punishment, the issue can be defined in terms of ‘innocence frame’ that accentuates imperfections in the justice system, or in terms of the ‘morality-based frame’ that focuses on the question whether it is right or wrong to kill when punishing (Dardis et al. 2008; Baumgartner et al. 2008). In strategic framing just as in any kind of strategic action, there are as Jasper (2006: 171) points out, ‘few rules... but many choices’.