Framing War (Public Opinion and Decision-Making in Comparative Perspective)

Framing War uses the recent war on Iraq as a case study, focusing on the elite and media framing of this event in order to examine the interaction between the political elite and the mass public in three Western democracies—France, Italy, and the US—during the early and on-going stages of the military crisis. The book analyzes whether and, potentially, the extent to which decision-makers tracked and responded to public opinion in presenting their foreign policy choices. It examines the strategies and approaches that governments potentially adopted to influence public opinion towards either the need for or the lack of need for a military intervention. By representing the framing paradigm as a cycle, Olmastroni shows how each actor within the system (i.e., government and other elites, news media, and public opinion) is linked to the others and contributes to the final representation of an issue.