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Category: Project

Description: The literature on framing by social movement scholars has traditionally emphasized four dimensions that make a frame compelling: 1) a description of the issue in terms of an injustice because this arouses moral indignation; 2) a clear identity cue that pits people against those who are perceived to have caused the problem; 3) an agency component that emphasizes how the status quo can be changed if everyone does their part; and 4) a sense of urgency that emphasizes the importance of acting immediately to address the problem. A frame can have any number of these components, but prior work has argued that the combination of all of them is necessary for a successful frame. However, because prior work has relied on case studies, it has been unable to disentangle the independent causal effects of the different components of framings. This project employs a survey-experiment in Brazil to test how different frame components individually (and interactively) affect the public’s attitudes towards a certain problem.