“Protect the women!” Trans-exclusionary feminist issue framing and support for transgender rights

An increasingly salient policy innovation pursued by LGBT+ rights groups and socially liberal policy entrepreneurs is the right of trans people to bring their legally recorded sex in line with their lived gender by way of self-identification. In response to these moves toward trans inclusion, a unique coalition of trans-exclusionary (gender critical) feminists and traditionalist conservatives has emerged to challenge these reforms. This coalition of policy opponents, mirroring historical issue frames that present homosexuals as predatory sexual deviants, campaign on a salient issue frame that presents transgender individuals and the expansion of trans rights as an inimical threat to the security, safety, and welfare of (cisgender) women, particularly in single-sex spaces. In this paper, we address two questions. First, we ask: do trans-exclusionary “protect women” issue frames over the alleged threat of trans persons to (cis) women shape mass public opinion? Second, we ask: in a relatively LGBT+ friendly policy environment, who supports the right to self-identification for trans individuals? We answer these questions via an original pre-registered survey experiment embedded within the 2021 Scottish Election Study. We find that trans-exclusionary issue frames appealing to (cis) women's safety significantly depress support for trans rights, particularly among women respondents. Highlighting these concerns is an effective means of increasing already robust opposition to reforms designed to improve the welfare of transgender individuals, which should be of concern for proponents of self-identification policies.     

Framing Food Policy: The Case of Raw Milk

Policies governing the sale of raw milk—making the sales of raw milk more permissive—are gaining traction on the legislative agendas of dozens of states. This paper examines one contributor to this movement on the policy agenda: the role of competitive framing. By combining theoretical approaches from policy studies and political psychology theories of competitive framing, we offer evidence supporting the recent relative success of raw milk activists in several state legislatures. Using an Internet survey‐based experiment with a sample size of 1,630 respondents from seven Midwestern states, we show that a frame emphasizing consumer choice and food freedom is more effective than the frame that dominates among the policy establishment, that emphasizing public health risks. This is true in both one‐sided and competitive framing contexts. We further show that those previously aware of this issue were less influenced by the public health frame than those naïve to the issue. Our results suggest that the pro‐raw milk movement may be making strides on the state policy agenda because their frames are more resonant among the public. We also highlight the advantages gained from considering psychological and policy processes simultaneously to understand policy change.     

The press and issue framing in the Australian mining tax debate

Using supervised learning techniques to code newspaper articles on the Minerals Resource Rent Tax (originally known as the Resources Super Profits Tax), this article analyses sources of partiality and emphasis in media coverage of the issue. It shows that opponents were more successful in airing their views in the opening stages of the debate, but the government's re-branding led to more favourable media coverage. There was a regional bias, however, with newspapers in states dominated by mining interests more critical than newspapers from other states. The only truly national newspaper (the Australian) was notable for having fewer ‘neutral’ articles, with a relatively high number of both negative and positive articles. The Australian Financial Review, meanwhile, had a greater number of neutral articles. Framing remained homogenous over time though variable across publications.

本文使用指导学习技术,对有关矿产资源租借税的报刊文章进行编码,分析了媒体就此话题的报道其中中立性和重点性的根源。研究显示,反对者在辩论的开始阶段成功地传播他们的观点。不过,政府的再推广也达到了有利的媒体宣传效果。当然,会有地区偏差,矿业利益集团控制的州,那里的报纸会比其他州更持批判立场。唯一名副其实的全国性大报登载的“中性”文章明显要少,负面和正面的文章都比较多,而《澳大利亚财经评论》倒是刊登了较多的中性文章。总之,格局一直比较单一,但具体到出版物则有参差。     

The Importance of Attention Diversity and How to Measure It

Studies of political attention often focus on attention to a single issue, such as front‐page coverage of the economy. However, examining attention to a single issue without accounting for the agenda as a whole can lead to faulty assumptions. One solution is to consider the diversity of attention; that is, how narrowly or widely attention is distributed across items (e.g., issues on an agenda or, at a lower level, frames in an issue debate). Attention diversity is an important variable in its own right, offering insight into how agendas vary in their accessibility to policy problems and perspectives. Yet despite the importance of attention diversity, we lack a standard for how best to measure it. This paper focuses on the four most commonly used measures: the inverse Herfindahl Index, Shannon's H, and their normalized versions. We discuss the purposes of these measures and compare them through simulations and using three real‐world datasets. We conclude that both Shannon's H and its normalized form are better measures, minimizing the danger of spurious findings that could result from the less sensitive Herfindahl measures. The choice between the Shannon's H measures should be made based on whether variance in the total number of possible items (e.g., issues) is meaningful.     

Making news and making space: Framing Vancouver's Downtown Eastside

How is inner city space represented and by whom? Drawing from an extensive framing analysis of print media portrayals of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside between 1996 and 2008, we offer a detailed assessment of the predominately negative portrayal of the neighbourhood, and the centrality of three frames: medicalization, criminalization, and socialization. Certain social actors are given a privileged position in the media in the representation of the inner city. Outsiders are privileged over insiders, with the neighbourhood constituted as a problematic space and its residents as passive victims. The effect is to further the stigmatization of an already marginalized neighbourhood, and to accentuate the disempowerment of its residents.     

Framed for Compromise? The Role of Bill Framing in State Legislative Behavior on Natural Gas Policy

State legislative decision making on natural gas policy has become a balancing act, as legislators are forced to grapple with tensions between economically beneficial policies and environmental impacts. Despite increased public attention to the benefits and costs related to hydraulic fracturing, there has been little scholarly attention paid to how policy framing affects legislator behavior on this issue. We analyze recorded votes on bills relating to natural gas policy in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico between 1999 and 2008; a time period spanning the recent boom. Using a novel database of bill frames, we create a ratio measure that accounts for the proportion of environmental to economic arguments within each piece of legislation. We find status quo–challenging, anti‐development policies can receive bipartisan support, as long as economic frames balance or are greater than environmental frames. Framing natural gas as a win‐win scenario where economic benefit and environmental protection can be achieved simultaneously is an effective legislative strategy. Using the case of natural gas policy, this study demonstrates bill framing substantively affects state legislator vote choice and implies bipartisan compromise is possible given the right balance of frames.     

Empowering marginal lifescapes: the heritage of crofters in between the past and the present

There is a rich, but unacknowledged, heritage of rural subalterns, crofters, in Scandinavia. A Swedish-Norwegian interdisciplinary research-network investigated the most prominent category – the remains of crofts. Due to industrialisation, urbanisation and the modern welfare state, the institution of crofting was abolished, and many crofters left for opportunities elsewhere. The welfare state transformed a landscape of living and working people into a one filled with relicts mostly from the nineteenth century. Although numerous and important to local citizens, these sites fall outside the authorised heritage discourse (AHD) in terms of both research and heritage management. This paper takes an environmental justice perspective to challenge the AHD. Three themes are in focus: (1) bringing out the history of a subaltern and marginalised group of people; (2) promoting crofts as heritage of importance to local citizens and demanding complex management due to the various historical narratives and risks; (3) considering the crofting landscapes in relation to the (economisation) framing of heritage in development processes, especially in relation to fair development in present rural communities.     

Educating Citizens or Defying Federal Authority? A Comparative Study of In‐State Tuition for Undocumented Students

Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of state government policies addressing immigration‐related issues. This article addresses an example of state policy regarding immigration: since 2001, 11 state legislatures have granted undocumented high school graduates in‐state tuition status should they wish to attend public post‐secondary schools, while 18 others have considered, and rejected, the same policy. We argue that these outcomes are largely explicable by the manner in which the policy is presented and debated within state legislatures, especially the terms in which policy targets are socially constructed and state jurisdictional authority is framed. We apply this framework to two states (Kansas and Arkansas) that, in spite of demographic institutional similarities, reached different outcomes on in‐state tuition bills. The different outcomes can be traced to the manner in which policy deliberations in Kansas focused on positive evaluations of undocumented high school students, portraying them as “proto‐citizens,” while in Arkansas debate became centered on the state's jurisdictional authority to enact such a policy, an issue frame that effectively killed the legislation. This article suggests the importance of both social constructions and issue framing when state legislatures become the lead actors in crafting immigration policies.     

Are Debates about “Morality Policy” Really about Morality? Framing Opposition to Gay and Lesbian Rights

A growing number of studies identify “morality policy” as a distinct category of public policy and have tested several related hypotheses. This article reexamines morality policy as a conceptual category and an empirical phenomenon. As others have pointed out, we should distinguish morality policy from other policies by how political actors frame issues rather than by its substantive content. In the first part of the article, I argue that we should view morality “policy” as one of two broad strategies for framing issues, rather than try to fit it into existing policy typologies. Next, I move beyond viewing morality policy as a single, broad category by identifying several distinct subtypes of morality frames. In the second part of the article, I challenge a basic assumption of the morality policy paradigm—that advocates frame morality policy issues by engaging in moralistic discourse that reflects their basic beliefs and values. Gay rights issues are a strong test of this claim because the literature cites them as typical examples of morality policy, and gay rights opponents would seem especially likely to engage in “morality talk” in framing these issues. Very few studies of morality policy actually observe framing behavior and what it reveals about the political strategy of each side. Congressional and state‐level data reveal that opponents usually do not frame gay rights issues in terms of the morality of homosexuality or religious injunctions against it, even in most states where we would expect to find it. Instead, they emphasize frames that focus on alleged negative social consequences from gay rights and procedural arguments about who should make policy and how it should be made. Although many opponents of gay rights disapprove of homosexuality on moral and religious grounds, their framing behavior reflects more complex strategic considerations. I speculate that opponents deemphasize morality talk because it is politically disadvantageous compared with other kinds of frames, and because of greater acceptance of gays in society. In reducing gay rights debates to moral and religious judgments, the morality policy perspective obscures the complexity of advocates' framing strategies and ignores many of their most important arguments.