Winning with Words: The Origins and Impact of Political Framing. Brian Schaffner and Patrick Sellers, eds. New York, NY: Routledge, 2009. 200 pp.
With this book, political scientists Brian Schaffner and Patrick Sellers set out to bring some clarity to a set of issues that had troubled their own investigations into the nature of public opinion, public policy, and the role that message-framing might play in the process. They convened a conference of scholars at American University in 2007, and this unique little book is the result. In it, they and their contributors have managed to clarify some important distinctions between approaches to the study of elite framing strategy and practice, and those that are focused on understanding the factors that govern the impact of those frames on audiences, and on the policy process more generally.
As editors, Shaffner and Sellers have been especially careful to ensure that each chapter calls the readers’ attention to a broad range of issues, insights, and concerns that are addressed in other chapters in the book, as well as within the scholarly literature.
Eight of the chapters in this volume pursue these goals through their assessments of policy debates and alternative strategies used in electoral campaigns, aided in part by a number of original experimental and time-series analyses designed to assess the impact of alternative and evolving issue frames. However, the final chapter, written by Shanto Iyengar, serves to remind us that the problem of generating a definition of framing that could unify the approaches of scholars in political science, sociology, communication, and social psychology is not yet close to being solved.
The policy topics featured in these core chapters cover some interesting ideological terrain. Thomas Nelson, Dana Wittmer, and Allyson Shortle explore the strategic use of framing techniques in the service of what they refer to as “value recruitment.” They demonstrate how competing camps in the debate over the place of “intelligent design” within the nation’s public school science curriculum attempted to claim the moral high ground through the use of specific strategies and tactics. Experimental evidence helped to validate activists’ assumptions about the importance of specific value frames.
Another highly contentious ideological debate is featured in Jessica Gerrity’s assessment of the role that interest groups played in framing the issue of “partial-birth abortion.” Gerrity’s analysis emphasized the differences in strategies used by organized interest groups in delivering targeted framing appeals to the public, to the media, and to the policy elites in Congress.
Douglas Harris characterized the strategies that have been used by congressional policy entrepreneurs in their efforts to influence legislative debates over issues that frequently divide the political parties. He noted their use of public opinion data to determine which frames have the greatest potential for mobilizing traditional constituents, as well as for repairing the party’s image in a particular policy domain.
Electoral campaigns were the point of focus for Taylor Ansley and co-editor Sellers’ chapter on strategic framing efforts. They provide key markers of changes in campaign strategies over time. Many of these were in response to the opportunities and challenges represented by web-based communications. They make good use of the 2006 senatorial campaigns to help outline the role that greater decentralization may play in future electoral contests.
The chapters that focused primarily on the nature of framing effects made use of a number of different and, in some cases, quite innovative approaches to extending the power of survey-based experiments. James Druckman utilized election day exit polls to test the impact of randomly assigned message frames on a casino gambling referendum in Chicago. Druckman’s use of competing frames in some of the treatments made it possible to engage in a kind of sensitivity analysis that helped to clarify the relative power of moral versus economic rationales in garnering support for particular policy options.
Co-editor Schaffner and Mary Atkinson also used a survey in an explicit test of the power of a rather simple, but powerful shift in the reframing of inheritance tax policy from an “estate tax” into a “death tax” by Republican strategists.
Two studies made use of time series analysis to explore the links between changes in media frames and associated changes in the public’s response. Michael Wagner explored the impact of congressional issue framing on party identification by examining the relationships between the frames regarding taxes and abortion used by congressional and presidential candidates from 1975-2000 in relation to changes in national election survey respondents’ self-identification with a political party. Unlike many other studies that emphasized the variety of frames being used, Wagner’s analysis examined the importance of frame stability over time as an influence on party loyalty.
Frank Baumbartner, Suzanna Linn, and Amber Boydstun used a more traditional approach to assess the impact of media frames on American policy toward the death penalty. Their comprehensive analysis of the New York Times’ framing of capital punishment between 1960 and 2005 was compared against changes in capital sentences and executions during the same period. A social movement to challenge the injustices within the court system is also shown to have played an important role in a rather complex process of change.
The authors here have done an admirable job of collecting these discussions. Naturally, Schaffner, an associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, and Sellars, a professor of political science at Davidson University, approach the issues and processes through their primary identification with political science. But there is much of value to be derived from this collection by students and researchers in communication, journalism, and media studies.
OSCAR H. GANDY JR.
University of Pennsylvania