Issue Framing Effects Across Information Environments

What are the effects of an issue frame before and after it gains salience in the real world? We offer an account of the effects of issue frames over a 40-month period while keeping issue selection constant. We leverage the natural variation in issue salience in the information environment produced by the 2019 Brazilian Social Security Reform with a combination of a supervised automated content analysis of Brazil’s three major newspapers (N = 2,862 news articles), a content analysis of 47 h of Brazil’s most watched TV news program, and a comprehensive search in all Congress floor speeches delivered by Brazilian Federal Deputies. These analyses allow us to accurately describe the information environment for each of our five survey experiments (N = 8,277). We demonstrate a substantial variation in issue framing effects before, during, and after the Social Security issue becomes a salient issue in Brazilian news media. Our findings show that novel information gained through experimentation triggers anticipated shifts in opinions when in low-information environments, but these effects dissipate when experiments are conducted within information-rich environments. Ultimately, if we had conducted each study in isolation, we would have drawn very different conclusions about public opinion and issue frame effects for each one. The results raise critical questions about issue framing effects and elite rhetoric across different information environments, which emphasizes the need for careful contextual considerations in experimental designs.