264 Accountability through Public Opinion
of people to conform to economic precepts of rational choice, such as making decisions based on expectation value calculations. Typically, the method of inference is quasi-experimental: respondents in an opinion survey are randomly assigned to treatment or control groups, with “treatments” being exposure to “framed” interpretations of an issue or outcome of interest (see, for instance, Chong and Druckman 2007). Much of the debate here is about the forcefulness of framing effects given the ubiquity of political “messaging.” Careful studies are able to show, on a case-by-case basis, that how an issue is framed can have significant, sometimes eye-popping, effects on public opinion. Describing redistributive policies as “helping the poor,” rather than as “welfare spending,” increases public support for such policies by a magnitude of order. Similarly powerful effects are seen in the choice between “death tax” and “estate tax,” between “global warming” and “climate change,” and more generally, by cueing the public to think in terms of “episodic frames” or “thematic frames” (specific events, persons, cases as opposed to broader sociopolitical, economic, and historic contexts; see Iyengar 1991). One limitation of this line of inquiry is that framing effects are easy to demonstrate in the controlled environment of a survey lab, where messages can be tested with the technical precision of a surgical probe. In many hurly-burly political contexts, however, politicians and their parties often compete constantly to issue forth a barrage of countervailing strategic communications intended to persuade, to deceive, to divert attention from one issue to another, or quite simply to drown out the other side. In other political contexts, a dominant regime in power holds command over whether and which messages are communicated to the public. In yet other political contexts, even absent a controlling elite, the public is kept at bay through widespread apathy, ignorance, and quiescence. Under these varying real-world circumstances, how can frames rouse people to action, and which frames prevail? This brings us to a second mode of analysis on frames with a more specific and specialized focus on their role in collective action and social movements. Frames give meaning to our experiences, and collective action frames render meanings in ways that are “intended to mobilize adherents and constituents, to garner bystander support, and to demobilize antagonists” (Snow and Benford 1988, 198). Here much of the effort has been focused on categorizing types of frames and demonstrating their importance during periods of collective protest. For most scholars in this crowd, the core interpretive tasks accomplished by frames are diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational. Diagnostic frames identify collective experiences and name them as problems or grievances. These frames, as a result, center on the perception of an injustice and involve a locus of blame. Quite often for movement leaders and activists, trade-offs are seen between the “objective” root causes of a problem and how that problem should strategically be named and blamed to generate the requisite level of consensus and mobilization. Elected officials and heads