What determines the level of popular support for regimes? There are two approaches to answering this question: one that emphasizes the role of culture in conditioning individuals' evaluations of political objects and another that emphasizes the importance of institutional arrangements in constraining and channeling individual behavior. I hypothesize that cross-national variation in regime support is, in part, a consequence of an interaction between cultural values and institutional arrangements. The results indicate that the impact of culture on regime support is mediated by the institutional context. It is this insight that can help us to better understand where regime support originates.
Objective. This article explores the strategic nature of framing following a focusing event. We argue that focusing events serve as catalysts for bill introductions along three particular causal stories prevalent in gun control policy: restrictive, punitive, and lenient. Methods. We employ a negative binomial regression model to investigate the effect firearm focusing events have on restrictive, lenient, and punitive bills introduced in both the House and the Senate. Results. Focusing events lead to an increase in restrictive, punitive, and lenient bills introduced in the House. In the Senate, however, focusing events lead to an increase in the number of punitive and lenient bills, while having no significant impact on the number of restrictive bills. Conclusion. This represents an increase in attention to gun control policy regardless of the causal story.Firearm focusing events have become an unfortunate part of the American experience over time. Examples of these events include, mass shootings at schools and colleges, such as Columbine High School in Colorado and Virginia Tech University in Virginia; assassinations of prominent leaders, such as President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; and assassination attempts such as the shootings against George Wallace and Ronald Reagan. Although relatively rare, these events can become catalysts for policy entrepreneurs to advance their preferred policy solutions in the form of bill proposals. The purpose of this article is to explore the impact of firearm focusing events on attention to gun control policy. We argue that focusing events serve as catalysts for agenda attention through bill introductions fitting three particular causal stories: restrictive, punitive, and lenient. In the aftermath of a focusing event, policy entrepreneurs use these causal stories to exploit the opening of a "policy window" (Kingdon, 1984) as well as to strategically counter opposing issue definitions. These efforts are made in order to redefine the gun control debate at a time of heightened public attention, which could potentially lead to issue redefinition and eventually policy change.Using a negative binomial regression model, we investigate whether firearm focusing events lead to an increase in restrictive, lenient, and punitive bills introduced in both the House and the Senate. We empirically test for the effect of focusing events on the type of frame used in bill introduction by using frames in bills as a measure of strategic framing. We find that focusing events lead to an increase in restrictive, punitive, and lenient bills in the House of Representatives. This represents an
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