The Political Consequences of Crisis Frames: Gender and Unemployment

• In Event: The Politics of Crises and Disasters

Abstract

American political actors increasingly use the language of crisis to frame some policy problems as pressing crises while they frame others as natural and intractable “non-crises.” But whereas civil rights leaders pioneered the use of crisis frames to justify the use of state power to address the ongoing struggles of marginalized groups, dominant political actors are far more likely to treat problems that affect dominant or privileged groups as crises and to frame those affecting oppressed groups as non-crises (Strolovitch forthcoming 2023). Because problems framed as crises can produce meaningful political and policy change, these variations in the use of "crisis" and "non-crisis" frames have important political and distributional consequences. Analyzing the effects of crisis rhetoric is therefore key to understanding the politics of state intervention and policy change as well as the politics of marginalization.



To do so, this paper explores whether and, if so, in what ways, using the language of "crisis" to frame political problems affects public opinion. In a survey experiment conducted on a sample of over 1,500 Americans, we test the effects of using crisis (vs. non-crisis) rhetoric to describe unemployment, a long-standing problem that took on new relevance in the Covid-19 pandemic era. The experiment also includes an additional manipulation: we vary the relative status of the group impacted by the problem between American women (a marginalized group), American men (an advantaged group), and “all Americans” (an unspecified group).



This study focuses on the responses of both American men and women, the advantaged and marginalized groups depicted in the experiment, and oversamples women and men of color. We analyze the effects of these frames on a range of outcomes, including perceptions about whether unemployment is a “solvable problem” or an “ongoing condition that cannot be resolved,” attributions of responsibility for addressing unemployment, support for state intervention, and emotional responses. In keeping with expectations about relative group status, we find that white respondents are also more likely to view unemployment as an intervention worthy problem when it is framed as a crisis affecting all Americans rather than when it is framed as affecting women, a marginalized group. We show further that white respondents are more likely to hold companies responsible when they view crisis (vs. non-crisis) frames. The results have important implications for understanding the impact of the language of crisis on public perceptions of the appropriate policy responses to political problems.

Authors

• Andrew Thomas Proctor, University of Chicago

• Tanika Raychaudhuri, Rice University

• Dara Z. Strolovitch, Yale Univerisity