Interpretative Frames in the Perception of Political Debates

The Frame Project investigates fundamental processes of understanding in public discourse. When analysing the dynamics of public opinion formation and starting from the basic insight that the effects of all kinds of political rhetoric depend on how they are understood and made use of by their addressees, the problem is that these addressees are highly heterogeneous in terms of political orientation and socio-cultural background. Public political statements are thus subject to different reinterpretations by various audiences, especially because they are bound to a specific `Weltanschauung` and perspective, which is recognizable and reacted to in very different ways. Instead of ignoring or evading this problem of sometimes radically different readings in different communities of interpretation, our research project converts it into the basic topic under investigation. The Frame Project looks at how political actors try to establish their interpretative frames of political issues and explores their influences on the interpretational orientations of various groups of audiences. Observing the effects of interpretation and reinterpretation in a genuinely qualitative research design will promote in-depth understanding of these processes, and of the antagonistic ways competing discourses structure people`s perception of a complex social and political world. The first objects of our inquiry are live-discussions in the evening news of Austrian television. The national broadcasting corporation ORF regularly invites to the news room competing political actors (ministers, delegates of political parties or public corporations, experts, top civil servants, etc.), who then have ten to twelve minutes to discuss their competing views on current political events. Using combined methodological approaches from Conversation Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis we will examine such discussions for the strategies used by antagonists to cast the emerging socio-political conditions and events in their own interpretative frames. That will include analysing how in interaction they achieve something like discursive dominance. However, the main focus of the study is to learn how various audiences with different political orientations and of different social origin see these discussions and the interpretative frames communicated: the competing problem definitions and diagnoses of cause and effect, the moral judgments and implicit remedies. We explore how audiences assign credibility and importance to different aspects of information and representation and whether or not they take them on as close-to-experience definitions of social reality. `Organic` groups of TV-consumers will be presented current political discussions from the news at a time when the matters discussed are still new to them, and invited to explain what is going on and how they make sense of it. Based on these rich accounts it will be possible to analyse which aspects of the different discussants` rhetorical strategies are ratified by which audiences, and how these strategies influence the alignment of their interpretative frames. The innovative potential of the study stems from its elaborated research design. Unlike experimental social- psychological studies in this field, which analyse textual materials by codifying and reducing the data to a handful of preselected dimensions, we set out to analyse the textual materials in their full scope. Moreover we do not just distill some more or less impressionistic peculiarities from a corpus of qualitative data, but rather proceed by following a systematic `Grounded Theory`-strategy, and by applying sophisticated Discourse Analytic concepts of how language perception and the constitution of meaning actually function.

The Frame Project investigates fundamental processes of understanding in public discourse. When analysing the dynamics of public opinion formation and starting from the basic insight that the effects of all kinds of political rhetoric depend on how they are understood and made use of by their addressees, the problem is that these addressees are highly heterogeneous in terms of political orientation and socio-cultural background. Public political statements are thus subject to different reinterpretations by various audiences, especially because they are bound to a specific "Weltanschauung" and perspective, which is recognizable and reacted to in very different ways. Instead of ignoring or evading this problem of sometimes radically different readings in different communities of interpretation, our research project converts it into the basic topic under investigation. The Frame Project looks at how political actors try to establish their interpretative frames of political issues and explores their influences on the interpretational orientations of various groups of audiences. Observing the effects of interpretation and reinterpretation in a genuinely qualitative research design will promote in-depth understanding of these processes, and of the antagonistic ways competing discourses structure people`s perception of a complex social and political world. The first objects of our inquiry are live-discussions in the evening news of Austrian television. The national broadcasting corporation ORF regularly invites to the news room competing political actors (ministers, delegates of political parties or public corporations, experts, top civil servants, etc.), who then have ten to twelve minutes to discuss their competing views on current political events. Using combined methodological approaches from Conversation Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis we will examine such discussions for the strategies used by antagonists to cast the emerging socio-political conditions and events in their own interpretative frames. That will include analysing how in interaction they achieve something like discursive dominance. However, the main focus of the study is to learn how various audiences with different political orientations and of different social origin see these discussions and the interpretative frames communicated: the competing problem definitions and diagnoses of cause and effect, the moral judgments and implicit remedies. We explore how audiences assign credibility and importance to different aspects of information and representation and whether or not they take them on as close-to-experience definitions of social reality. "Organic" groups of TV-consumers will be presented current political discussions from the news at a time when the matters discussed are still new to them, and invited to explain what is going on and how they make sense of it. Based on these rich accounts it will be possible to analyse which aspects of the different discussants` rhetorical strategies are ratified by which audiences, and how these strategies influence the alignment of their interpretative frames. The innovative potential of the study stems from its elaborated research design. Unlike experimental social- psychological studies in this field, which analyse textual materials by codifying and reducing the data to a handful of preselected dimensions, we set out to analyse the textual materials in their full scope. Moreover we do not just distill some more or less impressionistic peculiarities from a corpus of qualitative data, but rather proceed by following a systematic "Grounded Theory"-strategy, and by applying sophisticated Discourse Analytic concepts of how language perception and the constitution of meaning actually function.