Political Frame Research Articles

Neoliberal İdeolojinin Çevresel Yüzü: Ekoliberalizm

1960'ların sonlarından itibaren çevre konusu ulusal ve uluslararası ölçekte önem kazanmıştır. Bu durum karşısında ülkelerin mevzuatlarında çevre konusu daha fazla önem ve yer bulurken, uluslararası platformda çevre konusu konferanslar ve hukuki metinler aracılığı ile giderek daha fazla gündeme gelmeye başlamıştır. Tüm bu pratik gelişmelere koşut olarak siyasal ideolojilerin birçoğunda ekoloji alanına doğru bir kırılma meydana gelmiştir. Siyasal ideolojilerin hemen hemen hepsi hâkim ekonomik sistem olan kapitalizmi yaşanan çevre sorunlarının ana kaynağı olarak görüp, bu gelişmeler üzerinden liberalizm ve serbest piyasa ekonomisini eleştirirken, liberal ideologlar bu saldırılara karşı öncelikle teorik bir zemin hazırlama gereği hissetmişlerdir. Bu anlamda liberal ideolojinin tıpkı diğer ideolojiler gibi temel varsayımlarını ekoloji bilimine eklemleme çabaları neticesinde serbest piyasa çevreciliği (ekoliberalizm) ortaya çıkmıştır. Liberalizmin zaman içerisinde evrilerek eko-liberalizme dönüşümü belirli eksenler üzerinden olmuştur. Bu eksenler öncelikle içerisinde yeni birey tanımı da barındıran özgürlük, ekonomi ve doğa kavramlarıdır. Bu kapsamda makalenin birinci bölümünde ekoliberalizmin bu üç gelişme ekseni etrafında nasıl bir ideolojik çerçeve ve altyapı oluşturduğunu belirledikten sonra, ikinci bölümde ekoliberalizmin pratik yaşamda çevre sorunlarına hangi tür uygulama araçları ile müdahalede bulunduğu ortaya konmuş; bu araçların ne tür bir politik çerçeveye oturduğu tespit edilmeye çalışılmıştır.

The Video, the City, and the Spectator: The Architecture and Its Bodies in Front of a Video Camera

This paper is an investigation into the kinds of spectatorial relationships that could be generated when a moving image (video, in this case) presents a city within a political framing. To this end I will analyse three different case studies in which the city—its architecture, and its population—is the polemical common ground of the artwork: Guilty Landscape episode I—Hangzhou by Dries Verhoeven (2016), Sign on a Truck by Jenny Holzer (1984), and Història Urbanística by Video-Nou (1978). In my argumentation, I will adhere generally to Jean Baudrillard’s conceptualisations in terms of media “responsibility”, and those of Jacques Rancière when focused on the term “dissensus”, understood as the essence of politics. Importantly, and worth emphasising, all moving image works are able to mirror the spectator who, through different devices and spatial settings, becomes an active part of the representation itself: and a representation that does not require a form of response is a curtailment that does nothing but amplify the decision-making power of the powerful. Instead, Dries Verhoeven, Jenny Holzer, and Video-Nou confront us with their representations and bid us towards an active personal participation in its construction. Moreover, this could be considered as a reflection upon what might feasibly be achieved today in architecture and urban representation through various new media and their intersections with the moving image and performative arts.

Colluding With and Resisting the State: Organizing Against Gender Violence in the U.S.

The movements for racial justice, health equity, and economic relief have been activated in the contentious and challenging climate of 2020, with COVID-19 and social protest. In this context, feminist scholars, anti-violence advocates, and transformative justice practitioners have renewed their call for substantive changes to all forms of gender-based violence. This article offers a genealogy of the battered women’s movement in the U.S. from the lived experiences of two longtime activists. These reflections offer an analysis of the political praxis which evolved over the past half century of the anti-violence movement, and which has foregrounded the current social, political, and ideological framing of gender-based violence today. We conclude with a view to the future, focusing on the possibilities for transformative justice and abolition feminism as a return to our radical roots and ancestral histories.

“Looking from the Outside in”: A Study on the International Media Coverage and Framing of Nigeria's 2019 General Election

ABSTRACT This study investigates the foreign media coverage of Nigeria's 2019 general election through a content analysis of news stories (n = 135) obtained from 10 international news sources. This study aims to evaluate the dominant frames that emerged in the coverage of the election as well as the tones used by the international news sources in the coverage of Nigeria's 2019 general election. Empirical evidence reveals that the political system frame, human interest/people frame, and violence frame are the major frames that emerged from the international news sources. We also found that the tone of the international media coverage of Nigeria's 2019 general election was neutral, although the sum of news stories reported in a negative and critical manner was also relatively noticeable, especially by the American news sources. Overall, we conclude that the foreign media coverage and framing of Nigeria's 2019 general election were relatively neutral, hence maintaining the time-honoured fundamental values of journalism and election coverage—balance and fairness.

Mediated Contestations About the Political Agency of Youth in Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT The political agency of youth has been the subject of much theoretical debate within the domains of political science, youth studies, conflict studies and development studies. This paper adopts a media studies perspective to contestations about the political agency of Zimbabwean youth. Motivation for doing so derives from the recognition that modern politics is predominantly a mass-mediated politics. Relatedly, the subject of youth and politics has received extensive media coverage in Zimbabwean media. Using the critical political economy approach and qualitative frame analysis, the paper explores two purposively sampled case studies that illustrate the contestations about the political agency of Zimbabwean youth. Findings reveal that media framings of youth agency sidestep the substantive policy and public interest issues that animate and motivate young politicians. Such normatively deficient framing is attributable to the political parallelism and media polarisation that characterises Zimbabwean political discourse.

Critical coverage: How the media criticize supreme courts—Evidence from Israel

AbstractThis paper examines media criticism of the Israeli Supreme Court from 2002 to 2011 in two newspapers. We analyze the nature and patterns of press criticism in different contexts by 1) distinguishing between diffuse and specific criticism and 2) by analyzing criticism separately from political framing and the tone of the article. We find that the increase in diffuse criticism and political framing over time was often balanced with counter‐criticism, resulting in a neutral or even positive tone toward the Court. This complex picture enables a more sophisticated understanding of the nature and implications of criticism of supreme courts in the press.

‘Our Enemies Are Swindlers’! Conceptualising Anti-Corruption Legalism as a Securitising Device

This article seeks to conceptualise anti-corruption legalism as a symptom of a broader phenomenon: the securitisation of corruption. Securitisation refers to the complex social processes through which political actors frame corruption as an existential threat to valued referent objects; construct it as a security problem; and, in turn, acquire broad mandates to tackle it by recourse to emergency measures. By building on case studies from contemporary Nigerian legal history, this article argues that the securitisation of corruption is mediated, to a considerable extent, by anti-corruption legalism - defined as a repertoire of legalistic rules, discourses, and practices that perform a regulatory crackdown on corruption. As a constitutive element of the securitisation of corruption, anti-corruption legalism excises corruption from legal and other normative frameworks applicable to other crimes with a view to tackling it through a repressive national security paradigm. Securitisation, in turn, catalyses the decline of the rule of law through its corrosive effects on judicial power, judicial independence, and human rights. Taken together, securitisation and anti-corruption legalism are counterproductive approaches insofar as they undermine the evolution of democratic values, political accountability mechanisms, and independent constitutional institutions that form the bedrock of meaningful and sustainable anti-corruption strategies.

Unseen Wounds

Philosophical interest in vulnerability focusses mainly on normative questions concerning its relevance for moral, political and legal theory. However, beneath these questions there lies another one which is epistemological: How do we gain clear knowledge about another person’s pain and suffering? How do we recognize a wounded life? Drawing primarily on the account of Elaine Scarry (1984), the article aims at showing that the difficulties to apprehend and recognize a life as injured are not only grounded in political and cultural frames, as Judith Butler contends, but also in the phenomenological and epistemic features of pain itself. Pain is epistemically fragile. Whereas it is almost impossible to ignore one’s own pain, it is very easy to overlook the pain of others. This epistemic slope has concrete effects on the social and political life. Regarding vulnerability, the normative question of recognition and the epistemic question of recognizability, thus, are closely intertwined.

Retaliation against employees in the USA: an analysis in terms of organizational behavior

Purpose – The number of retaliation charges filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has been increasing dramatically over last decade. This analysis is grounded on the USA regulations and a merged city and a county local government in the USA. Organizational analysis was based on the work of Bolman and Deal (2008). This study's aim was to explore the relationships between organizational behavior and retaliation against employees in the USA and increase attention among scholars for further research as well. Although retaliation is classified under discrimination it is taken as a special charge. Methodology– The recent lawsuit examples demonstrate the apparent costly conflict within the local government, organizational structure and its systems are reviewed to explore if they are causing negative conflicts in the organization. Bolman and Deal's (2008) strategy is applied to the studied local government in the USA. To be able to understand the relationships between the local governmental structure and retaliation problems is deeply analyzed on structural, human resources, political, and symbolic frames. Most of the retaliation cases took place at the Division of Community Correction. To explore if there are internal contributors’ effects to the problem requirements for a job application and job descriptions of a correction officer are investigated and compared with other organizations’ job description for the same position, as well as training requirements. Findings – This study revealed several problems that the studied local government needs to address to prevent retaliation cases. First of all, the local government doesn’t have an established culture, and because of that, the employees are not sure how to behave or act when they face challenges. Although organizational symbols exist to eliminate confusion, ambiguity to provide direction, to secure hope and faith in organizations, the local government doesn’t have clear symbols. While stories convey values and serve as powerful modes from the tyranny of facts and logic, the local government’s employees are afraid of speaking out about some issues, and bad stories pass from employees to employees. In terms of policies, the study discovered that whatever stated officially is not in use. Harassment training is given to new beginners and never reoffered to current employees. Broken and unclear communication is another finding that might be leading to organizational problems. Conclusion – The increasing number of costly retaliation cases in the United States needs more attention to the causes to solve this problem. Public agencies are funded by taxes paid by households and companies to the government to receive services such as water, roads, education etc. Public agencies’ high lawsuit settlement payments jeopardize the public’s rights to have services. These problems have some indirect costs which should be taken into account. Currently, little attention is paid to the subject by scholars, and therefore it needs to be explored more. The results of the study would apply to many organizations including public and private sector.

Fetichismo de las armas y fetichismo de la mercancía: reflexiones sobre la lucha de clases, la política y la guerra / Fetichism of weapons and fetichism of commodities: reflections on class struggle, politics and war

El presente trabajo se propone reflexionar sobre la relación entre guerra y política. El punto de partida de son algunas indicaciones realizadas por Juan Carlos Marín acerca de la necesidad de producir una crítica del fetichismo de las armas presente en las concepciones militaristas del estatuto de la guerra en el marco del capitalismo que sea paralela a la crítica del fetichismo de la mercancía en Marx. Para pensar este paralelismo se toman los conceptos de “estado-nación” y “ciudadano” como las claves de la construcción de la fuerza armada de la burguesía. La “ciudadanización” como proceso de disciplinamiento de los cuerpos fundamental del capitalismo es explorada a partir de dos autores. Por un lado, se retoma a Louis Althusser, quien afirma que en la lucha de clases lo que se enfrentan no son solo dos clases, sino también dos formas de lucha. Por otra parte, se explora esta tesis a partir de los análisis que Dardo Scavino hace del dispositivo sarmientino de la oposición entre "Civilización y Barbarie" como modelo de constitución de la lucha de clases burguesa y proceso de ciudadanización en la Argentina. Por último, en las conclusiones se exploran los límites de la noción de "ciudadano" en el marco de las políticas neoliberales impuestas por las dictaduras latinoamericanas y el dominio del capital financiero en el ultra-imperialismo

The effect of political ideology and message frame on donation intent during the COVID-19 pandemic

We investigate COVID-19 related consumers’ donation intent predicated on their political ideology and the message frame - one emphasising the statistical number of affected victims, and the other focusing on a specifically identified victim. Across three studies, we find that the impact of the message frame depends on consumers’ political ideology. Politically conservative consumers respond to the identifiable victim (vs. statistical victims) frame more favorably while politically liberal consumers are indifferent across the two frames (Studies 1 and 2). We further find that this conditional positive effect of identifiable victim frame for conservative consumers is mediated by consumers’ state anxiety evoked by the message frame (Study 3). This paper concludes with contributions to theory, implications for practice, and directions for future inquiries.

The impact of disciplinarity on the cognitive leadership frames of academic deans in Jordan

The purpose of this study is to address how academic deans at Jordanian Universities perceive their cognitive leadership frames (bureaucratic, collegial, political, and symbolic frames) based on their disciplines. One hundred thirty-four academic deans have completed the survey and used in this study, with a response rate of 93%. As for discipline, there were scientific 56 and 78 humanities disciplines. A questionnaire with 22 items grouped into four scales, one each for the bureaucratic, collegial, political, and symbolic frames. The results indicated that the bureaucratic leadership frame has a high level than all other cognitive leadership frames, followed by a political leadership frame with a high level, followed by a collegial leadership frame with a moderate level, and a symbolic leadership frame moderate level. T-test results revealed that the Bureaucratic leadership frame and political leadership frame had significant differences in favor of scientific discipline. In comparison, collegial and symbolic leadership frames had no significant differences. The study recommended that university leaders should support academic deans to enroll workshops and partake comprehensive training on cognitive leadership frames to help them realize their full potential in contributing and developing their colleges and universities.

Reviving Albert Camus: Nonviolence and Pro-Independence PR Activism in Catalonia

In recent years, the electoral situation in Spain, has been marked by the issue of Catalan independence, which has conditioned the electoral agenda of all parties and the frames of political discourse. Against the idea of a violent movement that the Spanish nationalist parties and government want to transmit to Spanish society about the separatist movement, the nationalist parties’ and Catalan government turn to nonviolent discourse and action. This nonviolent behavior is based on what in the past century was defended by some public intellectuals, such as Albert Camus. Indeed, Camus is our exemplar because he also raises issues that continue to be relevant, especially in advocating principles and methods of nonviolent political action. Furthermore, Camus did so in situations of war and injustice through tactics typical of political communication the of activist groups. This article wants to show how current and how effective the ideas of Camus are today, when it is 60 years since his death, in some national electoral discourses and actions, and serve for activism PR purposes in the political communication frame.

Framing the Refugee

‘Framing the Refugee’ looks at the power of representation of liberal political theory with regard to refugees. In the author’s view, legal and political arbitrariness lies in the representing of refugees as lacking agency. His key point is that liberalism fails to conceive of refugees as politically capable actors, and he is thus complicit in the arbitrary neutralisation of their emancipatory potential and participatory powers. This paper emphasises the moral justifiability of that state of affairs by seeking some answers to the question of why liberal political theory construes a concept of the refugee that does not contain any element of political agency. Most obviously, the author acknowledges that refugees perform a significant social role in contemporary societies and are hence active members in them. Nonetheless, they remain neglected in their political role by most political theory. What does it mean to have political agency for the author? It means to have the power of self-representation, that is, of being allowed and even enabled by a given legal system to bring about change in the political order, or at least to participate in that change. But the author also calls attention to the role of ‘theory’ in addressing this downside of the contemporary liberal democratic order. Theory becomes even more crucial at times of urgency, that is, when theorists have a moral responsibility to deepen their philosophical imagination, as Hannah Arendt so forcefully noted. The theoretical task of ‘re-framing’ the refugee entails reconfiguring political philosophy and its traditional categories of sovereignty, citizenship and nationality. The liberal inability to accommodate the political agency of many members of the political community – especially of non-nationals – is a sign of the historical contingency of the current rules of political membership. This inability makes evident the imperative of rethinking politics in ways that avoid the arbitrariness of treatment and aim instead at equality and justice. If political leaders can re-write the rules of membership to suit their own ideological agendas, the same demand should be addressed by – indeed demanded from – political and legal theorists. However, this is not as easy as it seems, according to the author. In his view, political theory is confronted with fundamental challenges, the most obvious one being that ‘theory’ is usually unequipped to defeat its own ‘topology’. Note that in saying this the author is raising a more pressing concern about arbitrary law-making: it may be that arbitrariness – especially the arbitrary treatment of aliens by the sovereign state and by liberal democracies in particular – is inscribed in the very DNA of liberalism. No matter how odd this may seem, the author advances the view that ideas, however creative of a new order, or transformative of a given status quo, never appear in "free form", and are instead deeply rooted in a structure that constrains our imagination. The challenge is thus to develop a meta-theory that reconceptualises the very way liberal political theory frames marginalised sectors of society – such as the "poor" – as a product of an international economic order that robs those sectors of their agency as the very condition of its internal functioning. We must therefore question how the very idea of the refugee is produced, because it symbolises the construction of an inside and an outside that is complicit with the arbitrary play of legal statuses involved in migration policy. The author’s main point regarding this is that certain groups are sidelined by economic, political and social systems because they are already excluded from theoretical systems to start with. Keywords: refugees, agency, political theory, migration

Tweets That Matter: Reconsidering Journalistic Sourcing and Framing Processes in the Context of the #Grexit Debate

This study explores the news media Twitter messaging on the issue of Grexit, as an exemplary case of transmediatisation of problems in highly polarized contexts. Our analysis focuses on media tweets (in English, French, Italian, and Greek) using the Grexit hashtag between March and July 2015. There are three main questions on the potential reshaping of journalistic sourcing and framing on Twitter. The first focuses on the milieu of actors used by media outlets as sources in the #Grexit debate, the second on the types of news frames that dominated #Grexit media tweets, and the third on how sourcing and news frames interact to construct a space of power positions. The above processes took shape within a close information system, which included politicians, media elites, and economic experts that marginalized alternative voices and critical perspectives. These findings indicate that mainstream news media normalized Twitter to fit their traditional sourcing and framing norms and practices. More specifically, our findings indicate the following: first, traditional sources and powerful economic actors get easier access to online media reporting on Twitter; second, the negative and episodic media-driven frames take the lead in the frame-building process; and third, the non-elite political and socially-driven frames are marginalized in the framing building process. The Twitter affordances were essentially normalized by media to fit into their understandings of the negotiation process as a high-stakes international politics and economic game with predetermined winners and losers. It is also likely that this normalization reflects the normalization of Twitter by powerful political and economic elites aiming to offer journalists on Twitter easy and instant access to their narratives.

Characteristics Influencing Academic Librarians’ Political Skills: Keys to Organizational Effectiveness and Career Success

Academic librarians seldom view their organizations through the political frame. Yet, strong political skills are necessary for organizational effectiveness and career success. Using the Political Skills Inventory, survey data were collected in February 2020 from 260 U.S. academic librarians. Respondents scored in the average range on the PSI. Multiple linear regression revealed that length of service as a librarian, supervisory role, and structural frame score significantly influenced respondents’ PSI scores with a modest effect size. Honing their political skills will enable academic librarians to influence organizational decisions and forge new roles for librarians.

'Humanising' Statelessness through an Artistic Approach

In this article I critically examine an art-based approach to statelessness in institutional settings, to show how art can produce alternative insights on statelessness. Drawing from ethnographic observation, I show how an art-based approach tries to go beyond the predominant legalistic and political frames and representations of statelessness, but stay married to the same legal and political discourses. I found the art-based approaches observed do not subscribe to the idea that statelessness is only a legal anomaly and instead emphasise the creation of empathy for stateless individuals or groups. This humanises statelessness by showing their human vulnerability and creatively recognising their hope and agency. Regardless, artistic approaches can struggle to challenge the legalistic and political nature of the problem. It remains a question whether such approaches are appropriately promoting the views, perceptions and feelings of stateless persons themselves, as their participation in creating such art projects are minimal. As such, I argue for an ‘ethnographic turn in art practices’, which can ensure the participation of stateless people in the process of creating and demonstrating art. I believe this ‘turn’ could play a crucial role in the development of statelessness studies.

Issueframing als een vorm van equivalence framing

Abstract Issue framing as equivalence framing: The effect of conservative and progressive introduction texts on political attitudes reported in Voting Advice Applications The framing of a message can affect the way people think about an issue, and the framing of attitude questions influences the opinions expressed. Current research investigated political emphasis framing in the context of Voting Advice Applications. In an online survey regarding the European Elections (2019), a conservative vs. progressive frame was manipulated across 15 questions. As the original VAA did not include introductory texts to the questions, a control condition without introduction texts was also added. Participants (N = 106) were randomly assigned to one of these three conditions. Results show that there is an effect for conservative introductions to elicit answers reflecting more progressive attitudes, but only for the group of respondents with conservative voting positions (PTV). This pattern could not be explained by political sophistication: higher political sophistication is related to a main effect of more progressive answering behaviour, but does not explain the framing effect for conservative frames in the conservative group.

Politicking and Visual Framing on Instagram: A Look at the Portrayal of the Leadership of Canada’s Justin Trudeau

While digital media have become a central component of the contemporary political communication mediascape, many politicians have still not fully embraced this digital shift. However, Justin Trudeau and his team understood quickly that these platforms were powerful public outreach and engagement tools. Since his election as prime minister of Canada, Trudeau has been able to exploit the image-making and framing capabilities of digital media platforms to roll out a strategic narrative about his political leadership. Building on an analysis of all posts on his Instagram account during the year following his election as prime minister of Canada, this article is taking a close look at how Trudeau turned to visual framing in his Instagram posts to generate strategic political narratives, which emphasized and reinforced seven traits of his political leadership: 1) innovative leader at the helm of a prosperous country; 2) leader dedicated to positive policies; 3) leader dedicated to national unity; 4) leader promoting and respecting minority and marginalized communities; 5) comforting and reassuring leader; 6) leader valuing international dialogue and respect; 7) relatable leader. In doing so, this research work provides insights of interest into a specific dimension of the visual political communication strategy deployed by elected official on Instagram. More importantly, this article contributes to ongoing academic work on dynamics of visual political image-making and framing on social media in Canada and abroad.

On the Front Line in the Fight against the Virus: Conceptual Framing and War Patterns in Political Discourse

AbstractIn light of the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, military linguistic patterns and framings now seem to be omnipresent in our daily discourses. Media and political discourses play a key role in conceptualising the pandemic, its impact, and the measures taken to respond to it in terms of war. This study represents a comparative discourse analysis of a selection of official statements and speeches delivered by four world leaders whose countries have been severely affected by the coronavirus pandemic: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, US President Donald Trump, and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The linguistic analysis attempts to identify the differences and similarities in the political framing of the pandemic and these governments’ responses to it. A particular focus is placed on the range of metaphorical patterns that foreground the warlike and aggressive nature of these measures.