Traveling frames: How corporate and civil society actors try to influence public administration and courts in a case on nuclear emission data in Switzerland

• Author: Charlotte Stachel,Peter Seele,Irina Lock
• Published date: 01 February 2020
• Date: 01 February 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2008

ACADEMIC PAPER

Traveling frames: How corporate and civil society actors try to

influence public administration and courts in a case on nuclear

emission data in Switzerland

Irina Lock

1

| Charlotte Stachel

2

| Peter Seele

2

1

Amsterdam School of Communication

Research (ASCoR), University of Amsterdam,

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

2

Ethics and Communication Law Center,

Faculty of Communication Science, Università

della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, Switzerland

Correspondence

Irina Lock, Amsterdam School of

Communication Research (ASCoR), University

of Amsterdam, Nieuwe Achtergracht

166, 1018WV Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Email: i.j.lock@uva.nl

This paper focuses on the framing strategies lobbyists apply to influence public policy

in a case on nuclear emission data in Switzerland. Framing analysis is at the heart of

communication science and has been applied in lobbying settings, but framing theory

has not yet been fine-tuned to the specificities of public affairs research. This qualita-

tive case study gives insights into the dominant frames seven actors ranging from

corporations to nongovernmental organizations to public institutions employ to

defend a legal court case in the nuclear power industry. The results of the document

analysis and the interviews show that frames travel among diverse actors and only

some are picked up by the courts, at times stating a position opposite to the one ini-

tially intended by the frame sponsor. A public affairs-specific integrated process

model of framing is presented that views the media in the role of a moderator in the

framing process and pronounces the lobbying organizations' strategic goals, the dif-

ferent stakeholders as target audiences, and the outcomes of the public affairs

process.

1|INTRODUCTION

Lobbying is often studied in terms of how a variety of vested interests

influence legislation. Lobbyists can draw on a broad toolbox of instru-

mental or more participative and even ethical means to make their

voice heard (Lock & Seele, 2016). An overlooked yet equally impor-

tant avenue of public policy influence is the underlying framing strate-

gies organizations apply to influence the administration and the

judicial system. In particular, the communicative means lobbyists apply

to translate their strategies highlights why some are more successful

than others when influencing decision makers. Framing has been

applied to lobbying research previously (McGrath, 2007). However,

framing theory has not been adapted to other processes of public pol-

icy influence. These are subsumed under the umbrella term public

affairs (Thomson & John, 2007) and stretch beyond lobbying

legislators to include the perspective of other constituents such as the

judicative. In this study, we aim to adapt the established integrated

process model of framing from news media research (De Vreese,

2005) to the context of public affairs. A specific focus is given to the

role of the media in public affairs framing processes. To do so, we

apply framing theory (Entman, 1993) to documents and primary data

from a qualitative case study. By analyzing a specific public affairs

case situated in the Swiss semidirect concordance democracy, we

show (a) which frames are applied by the seven different actors of this

issue arena (company, nongovernmental organization [NGO], two

government agencies, two federal courts, and the media); (b) how

these frames “traveled”from the primary actors through administra-

tion and courts until the court case was closed; and (c) what this

means for framing theory if applied to public affairs cases.

Received: 13 November 2018 Revised: 17 May 2019 Accepted: 10 August 2019

DOI: 10.1002/pa.2008

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any

medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

© 2019 The Authors. Journal of Public Affairs published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd

J Public Affairs. 2020;20:e2008. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pa 1of13

https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2008