Framing War

Public Opinion and Decision-Making in Comparative Perspective

Francesco Olmastroni

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415724661
• eBook ISBN: 9781317932628
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Most research on framing has focused on media and elite frames: the ways that the mass media and politicians present information about issues and events to the public. Until now, the process by which citizens' opinions may affect the initial frame-building process has been largely ignored. The two-way flow of influence between public opinion and decision-makers has been analyzed more from a top-down than a bottom-up perspective. Olmastroni addresses this issue by introducing a cyclical model of framing. Additionally, most empirical studies on media framing have centered on the United States. Olmastroni's text seeks to overcome this limitation of prior research by examining different types of framing in three different countries.

Framing War uses the recent war on Iraq as a case study, focusing on the elite and media framing of this event in order to examine the interaction between the political elite and the mass public in three Western democracies—France, Italy, and the US—during the early and on-going stages of the military crisis. The book analyzes whether and, potentially, the extent to which decision-makers tracked and responded to public opinion in presenting their foreign policy choices. It examines the strategies and approaches that governments potentially adopted to influence public opinion towards either the need for or the lack of need for a military intervention. By representing the framing paradigm as a cycle, Olmastroni shows how each actor within the system (i.e., government and other elites, news media, and public opinion) is linked to the others and contributes to the final representation of an issue.

In contrast with other theoretical perspectives of framing, this book states that the framing influence does not only proceed from the government to the public, but it often moves at the same level of the system, with each actor playing different roles. Olmastroni's insights on framing are significant for researchers in international relations, political communication, public opinion, comparative politics, and political psychology, as well as policy analysts, journalists, and commentators.

1 A Cyclical Model of Framing

Past research has increasingly demonstrated that public opinion often depends on how political elites choose to frame certain issues (Nelson and Oxley 1999; Jacoby 2000; Gershkoff and Kushner 2005) and on how the mass media conveys political messages (Iyengar, Peters, and Kinder 1982; Iyengar and Kinder 1987; Iyengar 1991; Jordan 1993; Jordan and Page 1992; Page 1996; Kinder 1998; Miller and Krosnick 2000; McCombs 2004). As Donald R. Kinder aptly remarks in a summary paper, a number of studies have assessed whether news and propaganda about public affairs influence “how citizens make sense of politics (framing), how citizens decide what is important in politics (agenda setting), and how citizens evaluate the policies and authorities that politics places before them (priming)” (Kinder 2007: 155; italics in the original). Yet, in spite of the growing interest in the subject and in spite of recent research developments in understanding the interplay between political elites, mass media, and public opinion, the flow of influence between decision-makers and public opinion has been analysed more from a top-down than a bottom-up perspective.

While most research on framing has focused on media and elite frames, that is, “the words, images, phrases, and presentation styles that [mass media and politicians] use when relaying information about an issue or event to an audience” (Chong and Druckman 2007: 100), the audience member’s understanding and view of the issue (i.e., individual frame) has almost always been considered the dependent variable to be explained. If we rely on Scheufele’s classification (1999), only three of the four processes of framing have been addressed, albeit not adequately analysed, by prior studies. Frame building, which refers to the dynamics of how political elites and mass media choose specific frames to promote a particular interpretation, evaluation, and solution of an issue, has generally served as the main independent variable to study the influence of media and elite frames on individual frames (i.e., frame setting). Influenced by achievements in psychological studies, political scientists and communication scholars have focused on the psycho-cognitive and social mechanisms that allow individuals to process information and transform their individual frames into attitudes (i.e., individual-level effects of frames). However, they have largely ignored the process by which citizens’ opinions may affect the initial frame-building process (i.e., elites’ susceptibility to framing processes).

This limitation is addressed here by introducing a cyclical model of framing. By explicitly considering competition between frames as a distinguishing feature of modern politics, the central assumption is that framing can be described as a dynamic process through which partisan representations of certain aspects of reality are presented to the public. In this theoretical framework, as will be better explained in the following sections of this chapter, citizens are not passive targets of political discourse, but they participate in the contest of frames by evaluating the proposed views and their congruence with their own predispositions. As a result of the process of frame evaluation, individuals formulate their opinions about the issue at stake, which are then channelled back to political elites either directly or, more often, through the media and other intermediaries. Since these opinions do not necessarily coincide with one of the competing frames, politicians who hold or aspire to a position of leadership should make sure the public approves their message. If this is not the case, the original message has to be reinforced or a new and more persuasive one has to be produced. Thus, the flow of influence between the elite and the public moves cyclically from one actor to the other, with the public acting as the reference point for the contest of frames.

As mentioned in the introduction to this book, a comparative research design is employed to explore the effects of the elite’s framing on public attitudes and, vice versa, the influence of public opinion on the framebuilding process. The purpose for studying framing in different countries (i.e., France, Italy, and the U.S.) is twofold. First, a cross-country perspective provides verification of the “generalisability” (or external validity) of prior research findings by replicating some of their aspects in a non-U.S. context. Second, by using a multiple case study methodology within the same issue (i.e., the Iraq war), the cycle of framing is followed through all phases and in different political and communication environments. Such a research strategy aims to understand how the theoretical model presented here works in each of these environments. At the same time, it attempts to provide some insight on the porous distinction between manipulation of and responsiveness to public opinion in the process of framing.

As noted earlier and extensively discussed in the rest of the book, the interplay between the actors participating in the frame-building process is influenced by the presence and activation of legitimate sources other than the ruling elites. For this reason, a longitudinal (long-term) approach is adopted to illustrate the functioning of the cycle of framing both in uncontested and competitive communication settings during the early and ongoing stages of the Iraq war.

1.1 The 'Catch-All' Concept of Framing

Within the last several years, the concept of framing has become increasingly popular. Whether it is qualified as a theory, paradigm, approach, perspective, process, or model, the term ‘framing’ is often used in sociology, political science, social psychology, and media and communication studies to describe the way in which events and issues are presented to and perceived by a target audience.¹ “The interdisciplinary quality of framing is among its attractive features” (Reese, Gandy, and Grant 2001: xv), and its applicability to the study of political debate, mass media information, news production, social conflict, consensus building, social and political choice theory, conflict resolution, and individual and cultural relations shows the heuristic fertility of this phenomenon (Barisione 2009: 8).

This ‘interdisciplinarity’, however, raises some theoretical and methodological problems in defining and examining the process of framing.

First and foremost, although theoretical and paradigmatic diversity can be beneficial for a comprehensive view of the process (D’Angelo 2002), the use of the concept in different academic disciplines has led to the emergence of multiple definitions, which are often incompatible and difficult to operationalise out of their context. Political scientists and communication researchers, for instance, often employ the term to describe different phenomena. Some scholars argue that framing is just a second-level agenda setting (see, for example, Zaller 1992; McCombs and Ghanem 2001; McCombs 2004). “Where first-level agenda setting makes issues salient, second-level agenda setting makes aspects of the issue salient by the same mechanism” (Edy and Meirick 2007: 121).² Others, instead, by assigning framing multiple functions, use a broad definition of the concept so that it ends up “highlighting certain events as . . . problems that affect [national] interests (agenda-setting), identifying and explaining the source of [the problems] (cognitive priming), and offering recommendations for particular policy solutions designed to overcome these problems (evaluation)” (Norris, Kern, and Just 2003: 11; italics in the original). Finally, other scholars clearly distinguish framing from agendas, even if they acknowledge the importance of integrating the insights generated by framing, priming, and agenda-setting research to understand their implications for political power and democracy (Entman 2007; Iyengar 1993; Reese 2007; Weaver 2007).

Second, and in part as a consequence of the theoretical indeterminateness of the term, the study of framing is in continuous need of a conceptual reorganisation to bring all of its possible applications under a common theoretical framework. Contrasting views and approaches have been proposed in studying basic mechanisms of message production and reception. Therefore, the first step for studying the activation and spread of the elite’s frame(s) to the public and, vice versa, the way citizens’ perceived opinion may influence what political leaders say and do is to conduct a critical review of the main theoretical perspectives on framing and establish a standard definition of this concept.

1.1.1 Perspectives of Frame Analysis

Since the 1970s, when anthropologist Gregory Bateson conceived of the frame as a form of interpretation or meta-communication (Bateson 1972)³, a number of definitions have been proposed, leading some authors to speak of a “fractured paradigm” (Entman 1993) or, less negatively, of a “prismatic concept” (Barisione 2009) and “multidimensional and multidirectional process” (Martinez and Kiousis 2005). Even though a synoptic review risks oversimplifying the complexity of this phenomenon, two major conceptualisations have emerged to explain the nature of framing.

While early studies emphasised “framing as a process by which potential elements are either included or excluded from a message or its interpretation by virtue of a communicator’s organizing principles” (Maher 2001: 87; see also Gitlin 1980; Goffman 1974; Touchman 1978), later research focused on the sociological aspects of framing and the (inter)action of social actors in the organisation of symbolic patterns for representing the world (Reese 2001). In the former case, frames refer to the individual’s cognitive understanding of a specific issue or situation (frame in thought or individual frame) and are conceived as “organizational premises—sustained both in the mind and activity” of the actor (Goffman 1974: 247). In the latter, “frame refers to the words, images, phrases, and presentation styles that a speaker (e.g., a politician, a media outlet) uses when relaying information about an issue or event to an audience in thought” (frame in communication) (Chong and Druckman 2007: 100).

The difference between these two perspectives of framing lies in the definition, content, and purpose of frames. The individual’s elaboration of political messages is affected as well. This difference emerges sharply when the constitutive aspects and the implications of the concept are compared.

Undoubtedly, one of the earliest and most systematic efforts to conceptualise framing in social sciences is Erving Goffman’s Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Building on Bateson’s work, Goffman defined frames as a “schemata of interpretation” through which individuals “locate, perceive, identify, and label a seemingly infinite number of complete occurrences” (Goffman 1974: 21). According to this definition, these cognitive structures are “principles of organization which govern events . . . and our subjective involvement in them” (Goffman 1974: 10–11). In particular, frames permeate the communicative processes in which individuals interact and guide their representation and perception of reality. As such, frames are not only part of all human and social interactions, but they are cultural structures that allow us to develop a subjective sense of reality and facilitate an individual’s orientation in the world.

Partially inspired by Goffman’s work, Gitlin adapted the concept of frames to media analysis and defined frames as “principles of selection, emphasis and presentation composed of little tacit theories about what exists, what happens, and what matters” (Gitlin 1980: 6). The constructivist perspective that inspires these kinds of definitions (see also Touchman 1978) implies a long-term effect of framing, based on complex and accurate comparisons of existing information. To put it briefly, the identification of an interpretative schema is the result of a rational selection of information already stored in the mind.

This long-term effect is rejected by proponents of a more dynamic and short-term communication perspective. According to more recent studies, frames interact with the ideas that are at the top of the individual’s cognitive hierarchy—that is, the ideas that have been recently accessed and frequently activated (see the following)—by creating shortcuts for interpreting relevant issues. While Reese elaborated Goffman’s definition by suggesting that “frames are organizing principles that are socially shared and persistent over time, that work symbolically to meaningfully structure the social world” (Reese 2001: 11), Gamson and Modigliani pointed out that a frame is “a central organizing idea . . . for making sense of relevant issues, suggesting what is at issue” (Gamson and Modigliani 1989: 3). Similarly, applying the concept to the media agenda, Tankard, Hendrickson, Silberman, Bliss, and Ghanem described a frame as “the central organizing idea for news content that supplies a context and suggests what the issue is through the use of selection, emphasis, exclusion, and elaboration” (Tankard et al. 1991: 3).

The idea of a deliberate and conscious selection is not limited to Tankard and colleagues’ study. Contrary to Goffman’s “structuralist” (Gonos 1977; Denzin and Keller 1981) and “culturalist” (Tannen 1993) description of framing as an intrinsic property of all social processes, media and communication studies have gradually developed the conception of framing as an active practice underpinning the process of news production. In this perspective, (news) frames are presented as ‘media packages’, consisting of all indicators and devices by which they can be identified, such as metaphors, stereotypes, value words, visual images, and graphics (Pan and Kosicki 1993; Nelson, Oxley, and Clawson 1997; Tankard 2001; see Van Gorp 2005: 486). This is not to say that frames are independent of their receivers. In order to be understandable, perceived, and effectively processed, frames have to be connected with the individual’s culture and motivations. The key point is that frames are not present in a communication act as such, but it is the interaction of the message with pre-existing ideas that generates the process of framing. In this perspective, as noted by anthropologist Charles O. Frake, “culture does not provide a cognitive map, but rather a set of principles for map making and navigation” (Frake 1977: 6).

When frames are conceived as given, the role of communicators is seriously constrained as they can only convey their message within the cultural framework of the target audience. When frames are conceived as dynamic, a communicator can intervene in the contest of frames either by modifying a communication frame or creating a new interpretation of reality. By the same token, a dynamic conception of frames implies an interaction between the socio-cultural dimension and the individual sphere. It is by the process of framing that the individual element is activated and an external input is perceived and elaborated.

1.1.2 A Working Definition of Framing

The development of an active conceptualisation of framing which implies an interaction between the message and the individual’s predispositions has paralleled the need of a standard operationalisation of the term.

The problem with most of the aforementioned definitions is that while focusing on the theoretical and conceptual aspects of framing, they do not provide the operational elements to successfully identify and distinguish frames within discourse. When it comes to empirically measuring framing and, for the purpose of this study, exploring its effects on public opinion, none of them resolve the question of what the constitutive components of framing are.

One of the most frequently used and workable definitions to understand the boundaries and implications of this phenomenon is provided by Robert M. Entman. According to Entman, framing is “selecting and highlighting some facets of events or issues, and making connections among them so as to promote a particular interpretation, evaluation, and/or solution” (Entman 2004: 5).

In Entman’s terms, a frame is largely determined by its outcome, defining effects or conditions as problematic, identifying their causes, conveying a moral judgement, and endorsing remedies or improvements to the problematic situation (functions of framing).

At the heart of this definition is an emphasis on the social meaning of framing, which implies a powerful role for the gatekeeping institutions that effectively decide what news is. Either directly or, more likely, through their interaction, mass media and their sources process and ‘package’ large amounts of information on which we rely on to make sense of our social experience.

Communicators make conscious or unconscious decisions in deciding what to say, guided by frames (often called schemata) that organize their belief systems. The text contains the frames, which are manifested by the presence or absence of certain keywords, stock phrases, stereotyped images, sources of information, and sentences that provide thematically reinforcing clusters of facts or judgements (Entman 1993: 52; italics in the original) .

This process entails the exercise of political influence over people’s understanding of domestic and international events and the promotion of an interpretation of reality that typically benefits one side more than the other. Entman makes this clear by noting that “the words and images that make up the frame can be distinguished from th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: From the Elite to the Public, from the Public to the Elite
• 1 A Cyclical Model of Framing
• 2 'Going Public' for Framing in Different Political and Media Systems
• 3 Methodology
• 4 The Three Actors and the War of Frames in the United States
• 5 The Three Actors and the War of Frames in France and Italy
• 6 Conclusion
• Appendix
• References
• Index