Wiebke Junk and Anne Rasmussen
The framing of issues is part of the tool kit used by interest groups in modern policymaking. Their individual framing efforts are often expected to be effective at increasing advocacy success, and affect ‘who gets what, when, how’ in politics. This subproject explores if and how such expected effects of framing unfold by analysing a new dataset of framing strategies in the news media on 50 policy issues in five European countries (Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom). It accesses different ‘faces’ of framing, such as individual and collective framing, as well as different types of emphasis framing, meaning how selected characteristics how an issue are presented in the media debate. Two central types of emphasis frames which may affect the appeal of different positions to policy makers are, for instance, ‘what is at stake in an issue’, meaning the substantive priority promoted by the advocate such as economic or environmental aspects, as well as the framing of ‘who is at stake’ capturing the constituency an advocate claims to represent. In these ways the subproject explores effects of discursive representation and prioritisation and seeks to add theoretically and empirically to our knowledge of framing effects and responsiveness.
Subproject 1: Institutional variation in issue congruence in Europe (Rasmussen, Reher, Toshkov)
Subproject 4: Issue characteristics and responsiveness: The case of Germany (Mäder, Rasmussen)
Subproject 5: Dynamic agenda representation and interest groups in the US (Bevan, Rasmussen)
Subproject 6: Policy Responsivness over time in Sweden (Rasmussen, Romeijn, Toshkov)
Subproject 8: The framing of political priorities and affected constituents (Junk, Rasmussen)