Framing Public Opinion in Competitive Democracies
نویسندگان
چکیده
What is the effect of democratic competition on the power of elites to frame public opinion? We address this issue first by defining the range of competitive contexts that might surround any debate over a policy issue. We then offer a theory that predicts how audiences, messages, and competitive environments interact to influence the magnitude of framing effects. These hypotheses are tested using experimental data gathered on the opinions of adults and college students toward two policy issues—–the management of urban growth and the right of an extremist group to conduct a rally. Our results indicate that framing effects depend more heavily on the qualities of frames than on their frequency of dissemination and that competition alters but does not eliminate the influence of framing. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results for the study of public opinion and democratic political debate.
منابع مشابه
A Theory of Framing and Opinion Formation in Competitive Elite Environments
Public opinion often depends on how elites choose to frame issues. For example, citizens’ opinions about a Ku Klux Klan rally may depend on whether elites frame the event as a free-speech issue or a public safety issue. Past research has focused largely on documenting the size of framing effects in uncontested settings. By contrast, there has been little research on framing in competitive envir...
متن کاملMedia Framing and Partisan Identity: The Effect of Immigration Coverage on White Macropartisanship
Laboratory studies frequently find that framing changes individual issue positions. But few real world studies have demonstrated framing induced shifts in aggregate political opinions, let alone political identities. One explanation for these divergent findings is that the competitive nature of most real world political debates presents multiple frames that cancel each other out. We assess this...
متن کاملPolitical Parties, Motivated Reasoning, and Issue Framing Effects
Issue framing is one of the most important means of elite influence on public opinion. However, we know almost nothing about how citizens respond to frames in what is possibly the most common situation in politics: when frames are sponsored by political parties. Linking theory on motivated reasoning with framing research, we argue not only that citizens should be more likely to follow a frame i...
متن کاملAre ICT/Web 2.0 Tools Influencing Civic Engagement in Modern Democracies?: An Exploratory Analysis from India
Web 2.0 tools, while mobilising citizens to make informed choices, may also manipulated public opinion. This hypothesis forms the central theme of this research investigation through the historiography lens. Based on concurrent research from decade, the authors take a closer look at citizen-to-citizen engagement, so as to trace the role of web 2.0 tools, in perhaps manipulating public opinion o...
متن کامل“Stop, You’re Killing us!” An Alternative Take on Populism and Public Health; Comment on “The Rise of Post-truth Populism in Pluralist Liberal Democracies: Challenges for Health Policy”
Ewen Speed and Russell Mannion correctly identify several contours of the challenges for health policy in what it is useful to think of as a post-democratic era. I argue that the problem for public health is not populism per se, but rather the distinctive populism of the right coupled with the failure of the left to develop compelling counternarratives. Further, defences of ‘science’ must be te...
متن کامل