Forum Section: The Two Faces of Framing

Abstract

Policy decisions are greatly affected by the way issues are understood collectively by policy-makers and the public. Naturally, advocates attempt to affect these dynamics by drawing attention to one dimension or another. Lobbyists outside government, such as political leaders and civil servants within governing institutions, try to spin or frame the issues on which they work. Research on framing is difficult, however, because of a methodological complication: no individual actor single-handedly determines how issues are defined collectively. The collective dynamics of agenda-setting and framing are subject to strong competitive forces, maintaining a stable equilibrium at most times, but also to threshold effects that can occasionally lead to rapid shifts in issue definitions. Research strategies used to study one face of framing (at the individual level) are ill suited to study the second face of framing (aggregate shifts in collective issue definitions). We discuss the two faces of framing as they relate to recent literature on policy-making in the European Union and we suggest some avenues for future research.