Framing social policy preferences: A scoping review and research agenda.

Abstract

This article reviews over 160 studies that use survey experiments to analyze how framing affects citizens' social policy preferences. In doing so, it evaluates three theoretical perspectives: one suggesting that such preferences are extremely malleable, another emphasizing their stability due to deeply rooted predispositions, and a third arguing that framing effects are contingent on multiple factors. Overall, the scoping review finds strong support for the contingency view, showing that framing effects depend on characteristics of the frames, receivers, senders, and context. However, because existing research has predominantly focused on the characteristics of frame receivers, significant gaps remain in our understanding of how framing effects are shaped by other contingency factors. Most importantly, few studies have examined how these factors interact in shaping framing effects on social policy preferences. Accordingly, a novel research agenda is proposed, emphasizing the need to study these contingency factors not in isolation, but in combination.