Issue Framing

ISSUE FRAMING REFERS to the way in which a particular issue is presented to others. A frame is a central organizing idea that suggests how an issue should be interpreted. In other words, a frame implies what an issue is really about by highlighting certain considerations and making them appear more relevant to the debate. Virtually any issue can be framed in multiple ways, and these alternative conceptualizations often influence the underlying foundations of public opinion. For example, supporters of abortion in the United States tend to focus on women's rights and the need to respect their reproductive choices.

In contrast, opponents often claim that abortion is tantamount to murder, and that the issue should be understood in terms of protecting the lives of the unborn fetuses. These pro-choice and pro-life frames offer competing definitions of abortion, and these frames make vastly different prescriptions for how this issue should be resolved. Ultimately, issue framing is significant to the study of politics because it has the ability to shape political thought, which can, in turn, affect public opinion on controversial issues.

Issue frames typically originate from two sources. First, frames come from politicians and other political elites, who devote considerable resources to crafting frames that advance their policy agendas. And second, the media, while less interested in pushing a specific political agenda, utilize frames to organize news reports around a coherent storyline. Framing has frequently been equated with spin, which means using deceptive tactics to intentionally manipulate the facts surrounding an issue. Unlike spin, however, framing does not change the facts concerning a specific issue. Strictly speaking, it could be said that frames add no new information to an issue. Instead, framing seems to operate by making certain facts or considerations more salient, or noticeable, and by increasing the relative importance attached to these considerations. Thus, while they do not add new information per se, frames are important cognitive tools that are never issue-neutral.

One often-overlooked consequence of issue framing is that it provides insight into the formation of political attitudes. On the one hand, it reveals that people do not necessarily have what scholars refer to as crystallized attitudes—that is, opinions that are fixed and relatively stable over time. Instead, framing effects seem to suggest that people construct attitudes about many issues on the spot. In other words, people use the information that is perceived to be most accessible, relevant, and important at the specific moment in time that they form their opinions.

On the other hand, it may be the case that because politics are often complex and ambiguous, and there are generally multiple ways to frame any given issue, people lack strong attitudes until they receive frames that place the debate into a larger, more useful context. Either way, framing has proven to be a powerful campaign tool for altering perceptions about controversial issues, as well as in shaping public opinion.