Issue Framing and Public Opinion on Government Spending

Abstract

The issue of spending provides an interesting context for testing issue-framing effects in American public opinion. Competing partisan elites clearly portray the spending issue in different ways: Republicans tend to focus on broad, general appeals, while Democrats aim at more specific forms of programmatic expenditures. Their differing arguments undoubtedly arise because the varied issue frames generate different kinds of responses. This study uses data from the 1992 CPS National Election Study to examine the preceding hypothesis. The results from the empirical analysis show that public opinion on spending does, in fact, vary markedly with the presentation of the issue. This framing effect is powerful enough to induce individual-level opinion change. And, framing effects arise because varying presentations of the government-spending issue activate different sets of influences on citizens' issue attitudes. These findings have broad implications concerning both the magnitude of framing effects and the explicitly political nature of the issue-framing process. his article examines issue-framing effects in American public opinion. A single social problem can be characterized and discussed in several different ways. The specific terms used to create a political issue out of a social problem have a strong effect on the nature and degree of popular agreement with the various sides of that issue. An obvious implication is that politicians will attempt to define, or frame, issues in ways that maximize support for their own positions. The issue of spending provides an interesting context for testing these ideas about issue framing. Republicans and Democrats clearly portray the use of public expenditures in different ways. Republicans focus on broad, general appeals (e.g., government spending must be cut!), while Democrats aim at more specific forms of programmatic outlays (e.g., It is important to fund medical care for the elderly!). Their differing arguments undoubtedly arise because the varied issue frames-in this case, the general presentation versus the more specific portrayal of spending-generate different kinds of responses. In this study, I will employ public opinion data from the 1992 CPS National Election Study to examine the preceding hypothesis, along with its causes and consequences. Public opinion on spending does, in fact, vary markedly with the presentation of the issue. And framing effects arise because varying presentations of the government-spending issue activate different sets of influences on citizens' attitudes. These findings contribute to scholarly understanding of issue framing in several ways. First, they demonstrate that significant framing effects exist outside the laboratory. The effects occur in settings that approximate the everyday world of political discourse, on an issue that is central to the predominant lines of partisan cleavage in contemporary American politics. Second, the analysis shows that framing does not merely produce different distributions of public opinion; instead, varying issue presentations can ac-