Do People's Policy Priorities and Policy Frames Cluster within Social Networks?

• In Event: Networked Political Communication: Framing, Ideology, and Misinformation

Abstract

Individuals in the mass public tend to pay little attention to the news generally and policy news in particular. And yet a strong correlation exists between the news media’s attention to a topic and the public’s perception of the topic’s importance. Why? In this paper, we examine one explanation for this surprisingly strong association: the clustering of policy priorities within individuals’ everyday discussion networks. In her ethnographic study, Cramer Walsh (2004) found that news coverage encourages political discussion about a topic. In these discussions, people do not simply adopt the frames or considerations emphasized by news media’s coverage of a given topic, but rather filter the topic through their own personal frames of reference. These findings suggest that social networks might function to transmit both policy priorities and shared ways of framing those policies. We test the idea of clustered policy priorities and frames within networks via a reanalysis of the 1996 Indianapolis-St. Louis Study in which participants—and their network ties—described the most important problem facing the US in their own words. Using rigorous hand-coding and randomization inference, we demonstrate that policy priorities and frames cluster within social networks. Moreover, we demonstrate that some policy topics and frames exhibit stronger clustering than others; people not only tend to share the same policy priorities as their social ties but adopt the same frames in thinking about policy topics, especially when their policy priorities match. This finding suggests that some policy priorities are so embedded in certain frames of mind that the topic and frame stay linked even as the topic diffuses through a social network. The implication is that in many cases it would advantage policy advocates to think about how particular combinations of topics and frames might be received by the public and spread through social networks, rather than treating frames as interchangeable.

Authors

• Matthew Pietryka, University of Wisconsin, Madison

• Amber Ellen Boydstun, University of California, Davis

• Taylor Nicole Carlson, Washington University in St. Louis