Frame Construction and Frame Promotion (Strategic Framing Choices)

In this article, the authors discuss the three most important strategic framing choices by political actors (“substantive emphasis choice,” “oppositional emphasis choice,” and “contest emphasis choice”) of direct-democratic campaigns. The authors investigate these strategic framing choices in the media input and look at how the political actors change their choices in another communication channel (political advertisement) and over time. The results provide the following insights: First, political actors tend to emphasize one to two main frames in their media input. They generally also use their main frames in the political advertisements and stay on their main frames over time. Second, although political actors tend to emphasize their own frames, they do not exclusively revert to this behavior. The authors find that the political actors pay more attention to their opponents’ frames in the media input than in the ads. With regard to variation over time, the authors can state that campaign dialogue does not disappear over the course of the campaign. Third, framing is primarily accomplished in substantive terms. In the advertisements and toward the end of the campaign, the authors do not find more contest frames.