Building a Framing Campaign

Interest groups engage in framing campaigns in order to influence the way the public and decision makers prioritize and conceptualize policy issues. While a framing strategy may entail years of lobbying members of Congress as well as the public, interest groups’ efforts to shape perceptions of a policy issue can yield great rewards. Issue framing can lead people to alter their preferences, and the way politicians and the public understand an issue can be vital to its political outcome (Iyengar 1991; Kahneman and Tversky 1982; Sears 1993; Nelson et al. 1997; Druckman 2001). It thus becomes essential to examine the origins of framing campaigns and unpack how interest groups attempt to shape definitions of issues in the media and the minds of the public.