Framing Policy Debates in the European Union

University Of Virginia Main Campus, Charlottesville VA

Investigators

Abstract

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.