Inauthentic Policy Frames: The case of Public Interest Advocacy

A growing research program investigates the use of policy framing by interest groups (see review by de Bruycker 2017). Recent work has developed ways to identify and categorize policy frames, explored the conditions under which they are deployed, and measured their impact on elite priorities. Less attention, however, has been paid to whether these framing efforts are genuine. In this paper we introduce the concept of ‘frame (in)authenticity’ to distinguish between framing efforts that accurately capture an alignment between a group’s justification for their asks and the group’s objective interests, from purely performative or strategic justifications that disguise intentions. We develop this concept with reference to public interest framing – which denotes the efforts of framing a group’s preferred policy solution as benefitting all of society, not only particularistic interests. The conceptual innovation of frame (in)authenticity is important when applied to public interest advocacy specifically, but also policy framing more broadly. For normative reasons it is crucial to parse out inauthentic framing activities, as they undermine democratic interest representation, for example by creating the illusion of social license to operate, even if a groups’ preferred policy solution implies externalities adverse to the public interest. And for instrumental reasons it is similarly important to compare the fit between groups’ expressed and implicit intentions, because it allows researchers to draw better inferences about the drivers of different framing strategies. The paper first sets out the need for the concept, offers some illustrations, and thereafter develops expectations as to where and when we should expect groups to deploy (in)authentic public interest frames.