Episodic and Thematic Framing Effects on the Attribution of Responsibility: The Effects of Personalized and Contextualized News on Perceptions of Individual and Political Responsibility for Causing the Economic Crisis

Abstract

The effects of episodic and thematic framing on the attribution of responsibility for societal problems have previously been investigated with experimental methods and mostly tested general effects on the public. The current work, instead, investigates episodic framing’s effect by linking a large-scale content analysis to data of a panel survey ( n = 3,270) and assesses the conditionality upon citizens’ individual political ideology. It does so with a focus on perceptions of responsibility for the 2009–2015 economic crisis and within the context of the Netherlands. Results demonstrate that exposure to episodically framed crisis news caused a decline in the attribution of responsibility to individual citizens, whereas thematic framing did not affect this. Framing effects on the attribution of political responsibility, instead, were conditional on political ideology: Episodic framing decreased the attribution of political responsibility, whereas thematic framing increased the attribution of responsibility to political actors, but both effects occurred primarily among citizens with a right-wing political-economic ideology. Accordingly, we add an explanation for the inconsistency of effect directions in previously published research on the effects that episodic and thematic framing may have on responsibility attributions.