The paper aims at identifying frames and framing strategies of private and public stakeholders in the multilevel governance system of the European Union and tries to identify the reasons for outcome change. With the triangulation of qualitative and quantitative content analyses the process of EU legislation can be traced and the identification of frames and arguments shall show how much and what was changed in the process and by whom.
This assumption is based on the theoretical approach of information exchange (Bouwen 2002, Chalmers 2013) saying decision-makers need information and stakeholders, private as well as public ones, supply these decision-makers with information since they have the expertise and knowledge about impacts and changes by a new legislation.
Some special factors need to be taken into account to extract the expected findings, for example through a comparative study of different countries, different policy fields, different issues and scopes of legislation as well as stakeholders’ characterization like type of interests the represent, resources and strategies as well as organizational factors.
The unit of analysis will be words, which are used in special contexts (frames) and with a strategy to fulfill a purpose (framing strategies). The main research question is what words and therefore arguments (frames) do stakeholders use to voice their interests with the aim of changing the outcome. Frames are understood as “(…) to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation"(Entman 1993: 52).
The analysis of these words will be done by looking at all publicly available data, like press statements, official documents of amendments, and position papers for example in consultation phases.
The analysis will be conducted with softwares like MAXQDA and WORDSCORES.
