Strategically Falling for a Frame: A Formal Model of Response to and Production of Issue Frames by Politicians

Who can frame? Recent empirical findings demonstrate that politicians are just as inconsistent as non-politicians when faced with different choice frames. Framing theory, however, describes politicians as uniformly strategic and purposive producers of frames, who are by definition immune to their effects. I argue that this approach should be substituted by a theory that accounts for differences between politicians in their reasoning capacity and purposiveness when they frame issues. I advance a formal model of framing behavior by elites that leverages this heterogeneity to ask what kinds of politicians are able to strategically frame, and under what conditions. I show that less-sophisticated politicians who are populists are more likely to adopt policy positions that match what they believe are the dominant issue frames in public discourse. I argue that this happens because such politicians unintentionally buy into the dominant frame, rather than purposively opt for it. In contrast, sufficiently sophisticated politicians can see through dominant frames, and, depending on exogenous conditions and their own level of ideological conviction, either attempt to re-frame the discourse on an issue to make it receptive to their preferred policy choices, or strategically adopt sub-optimal policy positions that they know fit better with the dominant frame they believe they cannot overturn.