ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the central concepts of political framing and its role in mediating understanding in public life, and reviews major strands of investigation. It discusses basic notions and core lines of inquiry in political framing research, some areas that play a central role for further investigations of the topic as it concerns language and media. Since it became evident that individuals' reasoning about politics relies heavily not on single facts and details but on frames, two loosely separable strands of investigation emerged. First, detecting the frames that give rise to political attitudes; second, investigating the ways in which issue framings in communicative settings impact such attitudes–such as find in media accounts. Research on framing is conducted in the social and cognitive sciences across a number of disciplines, and has been applied in the public sphere and to media discourses to understand their implications and consequences.
