ABSTRACT
Like its sister disciplines, political science has pounced on framing as a conceptual tool of impressive power for describing and analyzing important political phenomena. It wasn’t always this way; hard-nosed, quantitatively minded political scientists used to shy away from slippery and hard-to-measure concepts like “frame.” Perhaps the epitome of this attitude is Iyengar and Kinder’s (1987) program of research on agenda-setting and priming summarized in the modern classic, News That Matters. Not much content analysis can be found in that book; the main story is about how the frequency of news coverage of an issue affects political judgments relating to that issue (How serious a problem is it? Does the president’s handling of the issue matter to my judgment of his overall performance?). Yet both members of that team have recently turned to questions of content in their separate and quite distinct research on framing (Iyengar, 1991; Nelson & Kinder 1996; Kinder & Sanders 1996). Many others have come along for the ride, and as a certain anonymous manuscript reviewer can attest, there is a lot of interest in framing in political science now.
