This project is a large-scale study of the framing of political argumentation by interest groups involved in policymaking in the European Union. It makes use of new automated techniques to identify frames in policy debates surrounding 120 issues. The investigators coordinate with a large team of scholars simultaneously conducting interviews and fieldwork associated with these same issues, thus contributing to a large and growing infrastructure for the study of policy processes and the roles of civil society organization in the European Union. The larger project addresses issues of the democratic nature of debate and the relative impacts of nation-states, civil society organizations, and business in shaping policy decisions in the world's largest new political system. The focus of this proposal is on the application of tools and the development of an infrastructure that will allow the analysis of the choice and effectiveness of arguments by interest groups seeking to affect policy outcomes. This focus on framing contributes to the larger collaboration but constitutes a coherent stand-alone project. All of the documents collected will be made available on-line as a resource for other scholars of public policy to download and analyze in order to answer a broad range of theoretical questions.
The project makes the literature on framing more systematic, quantitative, and rigorous. More importantly, it uses a framing approach to understand a number of substantively and conceptually important questions: What are the roots of policy stability? Are those roots based in shared policy perspectives that become predominant within professional communities, or are they due to institutional structures? How do models of policy negotiation and compromise work within uni- and multi-dimensional policy spaces? Are most issues debated in the policy process unidimensional or do they have multiple dimensions of active engagement by the stakeholders involved? Can one understand policy change with greater focus on argumentation and framing? Can one predict and understand movement in offical positions on a policy debate with reference to the arguments put forward by advocates during the policy process? Do material resources, network structures, group type, or alliance with national governments affect the success of interest groups in promoting their preferred arguments with official policy statements?
This project seeks to enhance the study of framing and policy processes by initiating a large and rigorous automated content analysis study of political argumentation focused on the European Union in collaboration with a network of European scholars conducting parallel research on the same issues. This project enhances the study of policymaking through the development of new tools of automated text analysis to generate important empirical findings about the dimensionality of debate across a sample of policy issues and the abilities of interest groups and government advocates to affect policy debates through framing. These techniques and insights will provide a basis for further research on framing in the United States and other political systems. This project will train a number of undergraduate and graduate students and create a public web-based resource for the continued study of democratic decision-making in the European Union and systematic research on political argumentation more generally.
We were successful in our goals to: 1. Develop a technique to identify the frames used in political debates that is replicable and useful to other researchers and 2. Use that technique to discover: a. What types of frames are most common; and b. are most influential in changing policy outcomes. To accomplish this we collected all publically available documentation on 120 distinct policy issues being debated in the European Union over a two year period. We collected all interest group position papers, laying out their argumentation for or against a range of proposals as well as the positions of the official EU policymaking institutions throughout the policymaking process. This allowed us to track how the policy drafts changed over time and how the reflected the framing of interests groups lobbying on the issue. This resulted in a massive data collection effort, including thousands of documents, and tens of thousands of edited versions of those documents for the purpose of processing them with computer assisted content analysis software. This stage of data collection saw the acquisition of 11,647 files, adding up to 3.14 gigabytes. All of this data is available to other researchers at our collaborative site www.intereuro.eu and our interim collaborative site: http://intereuro.paprika-media.de We were able to deploy a computer-assisted content analysis software in the context of political debates called T-Lab. This software was developed by communications researchers and it allowed us to explore the framing of interest groups, how groups clustered together in their argumentation and where those various clusters of groups fell in the policy debate space. With this significant data collection and new research technique we were able to trace the patterns of framing and argumentation across a large number of issues, in a major policymaking system, for the first time. A number of significant discoveries were evident. First, the European Commission and policymakers in general, have a incredibly difficult task in attempting to aggregate the disparate opinions of hundreds of interest groups. We show that it is not only difficult, but might very well be impossible with the current techniques being used, which are largely government staffers skimming thousands to tens of thousands of pages of documents. We need a better way. Our computer assisted content analysis technique is one strategy to more systematically map what groups are arguing and where they fall on a range of dimensions, but through this cutting edge research we found that it is a cumbersome strategy. We hope that our novel research and our publically available data stores, will encourage other researchers to try alternative software techniques on the data and work toward tools that can help policymaking staff do their jobs better. Second, we found that much of the research on framing, done previously in experimental frameworks, fails to translate well to the "real world" of policymaking. This is evident with one of the most well-known of framing theories: Prospect Theory. More than forty years of experimental research has demonstrated that framing decisions as losses or gains has a significant effect on the process and outcome of decision-making. The behavioral economic theory undergirding this work is Prospect Theory, and tests show again and again that if a decision is framed as a loss, decision-makers are more risk-taking in their choices. We know policymakers and lobbyists in democracies around the world regularly engage in strategic framing – what we don’t know is if the ‘law’ of prospect theory holds in the real world arena of public policymaking. We tested prospect theory in one powerful policymaking arena: policy debates in the European Union and found that the large majority of arguments are so technical in nature they couldn’t even be categorized as a gain or a loss, and the minority of frames that could be do not clearly show loss frames to be effective in shifting policy outcomes. Third, while we had some important null findings, we also found that frame choice systematically varies across interest group type and institutional venues. Cause groups are significantly more likely to use public frames highlighting the impact of a proposal for the environment, human rights and consumer protection than sectional groups and firms. By contrast, sectional groups are considerably more likely to employ economic frames than cause groups when trying to influence European policy-makers while there is no significant difference between the use of economic frames between cause groups and firms. Hence, membership organizations are typically constrained by the policy interests of their members when deciding which frame to use to reach their policy goals. Firms, however, are not dependent on members and their resources and can therefore more flexibly choose their framing strategy. Rather than only selling their point from an economic standpoint, they can also justify their positions using another thematic frame.
