Competing Issue Frames and Attitude Consistency: Rethinking Campaign Effects.

This paper suggests that political institutions mediate public choices, and when citizens are exposed to opposing sides of an argument they make political choices that are consistent with their underlying principles. The substance of democratic politics is that political choices are organized for citizens by political institutions. To win political power, parties and candidates must compete, and a central aspect of this competition is to define the terms of political choice. In this respect, a frame provides a comprehensible basis suggesting how citizens should think about an issue. Parties and candidates solicit popular support through the positions they adopt and how they frame issues. However, previous framing literature has overlooked the fact that frames are themselves contestable. It assumes that citizens are exposed to only one frame, in which only one way to think about an issue is presented, so that citizens can easily be swayed to one side or the other of an issue, depending on how the issue was framed. I argue that to capture campaign effects, we need to consider how citizens react when they are exposed to opposing ways of thinking about an issue. And I hypothesize that citizens' thinking, being exposed to competing issue frames, is clarified, and they can choose the alternative closest to their general political principles. This paper explores this theory using the 2004 National Annenberg Election Surveys. Methodologically, this paper uses panel fixed effects regression with vector decomposition to overcome problems of panel data, such as unobservable heterogeneity, and not estimating time-invariant variables and inefficiency caused by fixed effects. The preliminary findings suggest that under competing issue frames, citizens tend to increase the constraint between their underlying political principles and perception of meaningful differences between candidates. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]