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What is the effect of democratic competition on the power of elites to frame public opinion? We address this issue first by defining the range of competitive contexts that might surround any debate over a policy issue. We then offer a theory that predicts how audiences, messages, and competitive environments interact to influence the magnitude of framing effects. These hypotheses are tested using experimental data gathered on the opinions of adults and college students toward two policy issues-the management of urban growth and the right of an extremist group to conduct a rally. Our results indicate that framing effects depend more heavily on the qualities of frames than on their frequency of dissemination and that competition alters but does not eliminate the influence of framing. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results for the study of public opinion and democratic political debate.
The past quarter century of scholarship on public opinion has shown that citizens' attitudes can be influenced significantly by how elites frame their communications in the mass media. In the parlance of this research, a speaker "frames" an issue by encouraging readers or listeners to emphasize certain considerations above others when evaluating that issue. A framing "effect" occurs when individuals arrive at different positions on the issue, depending on the priority given to various considerations (Druckman and Nelson 2003: 730). For example, a newspaper editorial defending a hate group rally in terms of the group's free speech rights may move readers to favor allowing the rally by causing them to weigh speech concerns more heavily when assessing the issue. Alternatively, an editorial challenging the rally as a threat to public safety may lead readers to give priority to maintaining social order and turn them against the rally (Nelson, Clawson, and Oxley 1997).
Such studies raise questions about the capacity of citizens to provide autonomous input into the democratic process. If public preferences can be arbitrarily manipulated by how issues are framed, there can be no legitimate representation of public interests or meaningful discussion of government responsiveness (e.g., Bartels 2003; Entman 1993; Zaller 1992). Public opinion fails in these instances as a reliable guide to policy.
Most of this research, however, has drawn its conclusions from observations of noncompetitive political contexts...