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9. POLITICAL COMMUNICATION EFFECTS 231

mid style, but audience members assemble the data about a candidate or
issue into a causal narrative or story that reflects their point of view or
frame (Kinder & Mebane, 1983). This narrative serves as a framework for
understanding other news stories.
Framing of media messages, in most instances, involves low levels of
attention and the use of various cognitive shortcuts to make enough sense
of a story or issue. Processing is likely to be of “low information rational-
ity,” sufficient only to satisfy whatever level of understanding the person
considers “good enough” (Popkin, 1991). Information processing typical
of most citizens can be categorized into three types of heuristic biases: cat-
egorization, selection, and integration of information about an issue or
candidate. To analyze such biases, political communication research has
borrowed heavily from cognitive psychology, using concepts such as
availability (Krosnick, 1989), default values (Lau & Sears, 1986), schema
(Graber, 1988), and causal attribution (Iyengar, 1991). Causal attribution,
discussed in greater detail later, is particularly relevant in that it connects
meaning at the individual level with potential for political action. Audi-
ence framing research has been influenced by constructivist perspectives
(Gamson, 1996; Gamson & Modigliani, 1989).
Audience framing is a complex construct in that it refers both to the
process of individual and interpersonal sense making and to the content
or output of that process. Audience frames are both cognitive representa-
tions in an individual’s memory and devices embedded in public dis-
course (Kinder & Sanders, 1990; Pan & Kosicki, 1993). They may be
elicited in a number of ways: through experimental manipulation of news
broadcasts (Iyengar, 1991), as reactions to actual news broadcasts to types
of news stories, a set of public issues (Neuman, Just, & Crigler, 1992), or a
major issue in the news (McLeod et al., 1987; McLeod et al., 1989). The
unit of analysis may be the individual or a natural social grouping such as
the family or work group.
One striking feature of the meanings given to news stories and to polit-
ical issues by individuals is their polysemy—there seem to be almost as
many interpretations as there are perceivers. But this overstates their vari-
ety. Audience frames can be coded in meaningful ways (e.g., cognitive
complexity, personal vs. systemic causation), and the structure of news
stories does affect how people think and talk about issues (Iyengar, 1991;
Kinder & Sanders, 1996; McLeod et al., 1987).
The origins of audience frames are thus likely to be some combination
of the news media “packages” (Gamson & Modigliani, 1989), the person’s
structural location and values, political beliefs and knowledge, and the
political norms and discourse of social groups. The framing of any audi-
ence member may be consonant with the news package, it may be in active
opposition to the media frame, or it might appear to be independent of the