How framing strategies foster robust policy ideas

Abstract

In this contribution, we identify how the framing strategies employed by policy and political actors make policy ideas robust. We examine the policy ideas of solidarity and sustainability to show how framing strategies that took advantages of the valence and polysemy of both ideas shaped them into robust policy ideas. Both ideas began as wide-ranging concepts designed to build coalitions in debates over a particular large-scale policy problem. Robustness is a quality that emerged over time as these ideas grew to become highly attractive framing devices to justify policy proposals. Moreover, they have proven to be resilient despite changing circumstances or even efforts of their opponents to reframe them in a negative way.