Task Frames in Political Decision-Making: Choosing and Rejecting Policy Options

In policy-making individual actors often make decisions by initially screening all available options, followed by a selection from a reduced binary or ternary set. This final selection can be made either by choosing or by rejecting. The choice of the selection strategy is not always free to the decision-maker, but a certain task frame may be imposed. Because deliberation and negotiation are an important part of political decision-making, the options can differ substantially with regard to the accentuation of their advantages and disadvantages. Some options will be debated more than others. So called 'enriched' options contain very strong positive and negative attributes, whereas 'impoverished' options contain more moderate attributes. Previous studies demonstrate that instructions to choose or reject between options can lead to different outcomes. Particularly, Shafir (1993) finds that enriched options will often simultaneously be chosen and rejected more often in binary choice than their alternatives. Such choice behaviour is inconsistent with the rational choice approach popular in the analysis of political decision-making. This paper investigates the existence of task frame effects in policy-decisions. We propose that task frames can both advance or cripple strongly elaborated but disputed policy proposals' chances of success compared to more lacklustre alternatives. We also expand the existing literature by exploring the role of a standard of task presentation. In an environment with fixed decision rules, regulations, or a strong decision-making culture task frames can be externally or internally imposed sources of decision bias at different stages of the policy design. Finally, we test whether task frame effects are sustained in ternary option-sets containing a compromise option lying between the enriched and impoverished options. We run our survey with political actors from the European Institutions and students, allowing an evaluation of the validity of findings from the more common student samples to political decision-making.