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C H A P T E R F O U R Personalizing Benefits: Issue Frames and Political Participation The Americans . . . are fond of explaining almost all the actions of their lives by the principle of self-interest rightly understood; they show with complacency how an enlightened regard for themselves constantly prompts them to assist one another and inclines them willingly to sacrifice a portion of their time and property to the welfare of the state. —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America1 I HAVE ARGUED THAT ISSUE entrepreneurs seeking to build movements around public goods must find ways to socialize the costs of participation. But costs are only one side of the equation. To expand the scope of political conflict—to involve the audience, as E. E. Schattschneider put it2 — issue entrepreneurs also must find ways to individualize the benefits of participation. In this chapter, I show how they do so: by redefining the issues at stake in a way that passive sympathizers see it in their immediate self-interest to become actively involved in the political fray. For most of its history, the gun control issue has been cast in terms that do the opposite . Gun control has been framed in a way that constrains rather than widens the scope of conflict. This chapter accomplishes four tasks. First, it briefly reviews theories and assertions of scholars who study different aspects of issue framing. Second, it analyzes the history of the gun control debate, which has centered on crime control against individual liberty. Third, the chapter discusses the effort in the 1990s to reconceptualize gun control as a public, rather than an “expert,” problem. And, finally, the chapter demonstrates empirically that these attempts to reframe the debate indeed did expand the scope of participation. Reframing the gun control issue got more people involved, over a longer period of time, in more intense ways than they had been before. These findings suggest, then, that the absence of an accessible, compelling issue frame was one of the key factors constraining the gun control movement. 106 • Chapter Four WHAT’S THE ISSUE? Scholars in a variety of traditions have long asserted that how we think and talk about an issue profoundly influences the politics surrounding it. As noted in chapter 2, scholars have used many terms to capture this core construct: issue definition, framing processes, causal stories, narratives, and so forth. For the sake of consistency, I will use these terms interchangeably , even though there may be subtle differences among them. Mayer Zald defines frames as “the specific metaphors, symbolic representations , and cognitive cues used to render or cast behavior and events in an evaluative mode and to suggest alternative modes of action.”3 As Zald and others have aptly noted, framing processes are critical parts of the larger political process. “Movements and countermovements not only are involved in mobilization contests to demonstrate who has the most support and resources at their command, they are involved in framing contests attempting to persuade authorities and bystanders of the rightness of their cause.”4 Writing about the notion of public ideas, Mark Moore argues likewise that “the intellectual properties that matter are those that qualify the idea in political and institutional terms, not scientific and intellectual terms.”5 The empirical literature on issue framing has focused on how differences in the way issues are cast affect political attitudes. Thus, new frames may activate different dimensions of an issue6 and in so doing affect the salience of the issue for individuals and perhaps alter their opinions about how political leaders should address it. In altering cognition, framing processes also have the potential to alter an arguably more important construct: political behavior. On one hand, reframing an issue may transfer issue ownership from one group to another group. Deborah Stone notes that different causal stories empower different people with different tools, skills, and resources to solve a given problem.7 Reframing is partly strategic: “People choose causal stories not only to shift the blame but to enable themselves to appear to be able to remedy the problem.”8 That is, “people with pet solutions often march around looking for problems that need their solutions.”9 Concerned individuals need mobilizing frameworks. Those frameworks arrive when skillful advocates interpret events or indicators in resonant ways. If the newly empowered group is large, well organized, and politically potent, the reframing process may expand the scope of conflict in...

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