(In)authentic Public Interest Framing in the News

• In Event: Lobbying in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

A growing research program investigates the use of policy framing by interest groups (see review by de Bruycker 2017). Recent work has developed ways to identify and categorize policy frames, explored the conditions under which they are deployed, and measured their impact on elite priorities. Less attention, however, has been paid to whether these framing efforts are genuine, and/or perceived as such. In this paper we introduce the concept of ‘frame (in)authenticity’ to distinguish between framing efforts that accurately capture an alignment between a group’s justification for their asks and the group’s objective interests, from purely performative or strategic justifications that disguise intentions. We develop this concept with reference to public interest framing – which denotes the efforts of framing a group’s preferred policy solution as benefitting all of society, not only particularistic interests. We explore how media coverage of advocacy can either echo these framing strategies or critically examine them, thus acting as a gatekeeper in determining the authenticity of framing efforts. The paper first provides a conceptual discussion of public interest framing and authenticity. We then develop a corpus of news texts and a computational approach to detecting interest groups’ public interest framing and journalistic re-framing. This contributes to scholarly debates on democratic interest representation, interest group repertoires, and frame contestation.

Authors

• Max Grömping, Griffith University

• Darren Halpin, Australian National University

• Anne Sofie Cornelius Nielsen