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Identifying frames: A comparison of research methods

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Abstract

Framing plays an important role in public policy. Interest groups strategically highlight some aspects of a policy proposal while downplaying others in order to steer the policy debate in a favorable direction. Despite the importance of framing, we still know relatively little about the framing strategies of interest groups due to methodological difficulties that have prevented scholars from systematically studying interest group framing across a large number of interest groups and multiple policy debates. This article therefore provides an overview of three novel research methods that allow researchers to systematically measure interest group frames. More specifically, this article introduces a word-based quantitative text analysis technique, a manual, computer-assisted content analysis approach and face-to-face interviews designed to systematically identify interest group frames. The results generated by all three techniques are compared on the basis of a case study of interest group framing in an environmental policy debate in the European Union.

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Notes

  1. This selection assures some variation with respect to member state size, duration of EU membership, period of democratization, varieties of welfare state and capitalism, Euroscepticism, and the state-interest group model (see Kohler-Koch and Eising, 1999; Lijphart, 1999; Scharpf and Schmidt, 2000; Hall and Soskice, 2001).

  2. This section of the codebook builds on the QUING project on framing in gender mainstreaming (Verloo, 2005).

  3. Interviews with Commission officials were conducted by David Marshall, Daniel Rasch and Patrycja Rozbicka. David Marshall provided much appreciated input in the planning stage of the interviews.

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Boräng, F., Eising, R., Klüver, H. et al. Identifying frames: A comparison of research methods. Int Groups Adv 3, 188–201 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/iga.2014.12

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