Presenting a United Front: Similarities and Differences between Interest Group and Congressional Issue Framing.

This paper examines how interest groups strategically frame political issues and how this activity translates in congressional debates. At the heart of this research lie questions about the ability of political elites to affect the role and structure of issue debates. These are longstanding theoretical questions in the political science literature (Riker 1980, 1993; Jones 1994), but empirically under-examined by interest groups scholars. While scholarship often looks for interest group influence in congressional roll call votes or committee behavior, a more pervasive form of influence may be found in how interest groups affect the framing of the policy debate. To explore this relationship, I examine interest group and congressional framing of the partial birth abortion issue over a four year period between 1995 and 1998. The analysis is conducted in two stages. First, I use content analysis of interest group inputs and outputs to examine similarities and differences in interest group and congressional framing. Second, I explore the factors that explain a Member's propensity to promote an interest group's frames using a Heckman selection model. The results of the content analysis suggest a high level of unity between interest group and congressional framing efforts on the partial birth abortion issue. The statistical evidence suggests a link between interest group activity and congressional framing activity. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]