Abstract
What politicians devote attention to, is an important question as political attention is a precondition of policy change. We use an experimental design to study politicians’ attention to incoming information and deploy it among large samples of elected politicians in three countries: Belgium, Canada, and Israel. Our sample includes party leaders, ministers and regular members of parliament. These elites were confronted with short bits of summary information framed in various ways and were then asked how likely it was that they would read the full information. We test for three frames: conflict, political conflict, and responsibility. We find that framing moderates the effect of messages on politicians’ attention to information. Politicians react more strongly (i.e., they devote more attention) to political conflict frames than to non-political conflict frames and they react stronger to political responsibility attributions than to non-political responsibility attributions. Conflict frames attract more attention than consensus frames only from members of opposition parties. Political conflict frames attract more attention from government party politicians. These effects occur largely across issues and across the three countries.
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Notes
All hypotheses laid out in this paper were generated ex ante—while designing the experiments. They were, however, not officially pre-registered.
This resulted in balanced experimental conditions when controlling for socio-demographic factors like gender, age, country, years of experience, political function (MP/party leader/minister) and partisan membership (government/opposition). For all nine experiments, we regressed the experimental condition upon those variables. None of the models was significant in its entirety. For the full models, see Online Material 2.
Data and do-file for replication can be found on the Political Behavior Dataverse (see https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/B3YH3T).
Models with three-way interactions between country, issue and frame confirm the robustness of these results (not shown in tables). In the conflict framing model and the political responsibility model, none of the three-way interaction effects are significant, showing that there are no differences between countries in the extent to which the framing effects apply across issues. With regards to the political conflict framing model, there is one significant, positive interaction effect (Israel * Issue 2 * Political conflict framing; b = 2.57, S.E. = 1.01, p = 0.011), showing that Political conflict framing does have the expected effect in Israel for one out of the three issues—or at least that the effect is stronger for this issue than for the other two issues, where it does not work.
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Acknowledgements
The paper draws on data gathered in the framework of the INFOPOL-project. INFOPOL is supported by the European Research Council (Advanced Grant ‘INFOPOL’, No. 295735) and the Research Fund of the University of Antwerp (Grant No. 26827). Stefaan Walgrave (University of Antwerp) is principal investigator of the INFOPOL project, which has additional teams in Israel (led by Tamir Sheafer) and Canada (led by Peter Loewen).
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Walgrave, S., Sevenans, J., Van Camp, K. et al. What Draws Politicians’ Attention? An Experimental Study of Issue Framing and its Effect on Individual Political Elites. Polit Behav 40, 547–569 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-017-9413-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-017-9413-9