Building on Murray Edelman's (1988) analysis of the socially constructed nature of postmodern mass‐mediated “political spectacles,” this research utilizes a Gamsonian framing analysis approach to examine the rhetorical themes and symbolic images employed by political proponents and opponents of the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas during the 1991 televised “sexual harassment” hearings. Because this dramatic national spectacle centered around the relative credibility of two opposed personalities in the public mind, the research focuses on the content of media images of the “real” Clarence Thomas and the “real” Anita Hill that were constructed for public consumption by the two opposed political camps in their attempts to sway mass opinion. Rhetorical motifs used by the “Hill” and “Thomas” political camps to frame the public debate are identified and classified based on newspaper and network television coverage of the events and on congressional transcripts. The impact of these symbolic messages in framing the context within which Americans ultimately gauged the “reality” status of Hill's and Thomas's respective truth claims is discussed, with particular emphasis on the intense symbolic contest that occurred between gender‐based and race‐based frames and on the implications for emerging styles of political discourse in postmodern society.

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Within the Western individualist model that has dominated approaches to "development" in most contemporary societies, an emphasis on personal ambition and individuated rights and freedoms is usually considered to be a

Sabbagh C, Powell LA, Vanhuysse P. Betwixt and between the market and the state: Israeli students' welfare attitudes in comparative perspective Int J Soc Welfare 2007: 16: 220-230 Analysing comparable samples of students from the CrossCultural Variations in Distributive Justice Perception (CVDJP) project, we explore the multidimensionality of attitudes towards the welfare state in Israel compared with countries from liberal and social-democratic welfare regimes (the USA, CanadaOntario, Sweden, Norway and The Netherlands). We derive six different attitudinal dimensions that constitute two distinct sets of opposing welfare ideological frames. The first set, market-based ideology, entails three coexisting criteria: individualism, internal attribution of inequality, and work ethic. The second set, welfare-statist ideology, entails three additional coexisting criteria: egalitarian redistribution, external attribution of inequality, and broad scope of welfare. Along with structural similarities, we find considerable variation in levels of aggregate attitudes across the different types of welfare regimes. Israeli respondents stand out because of their strongly ambivalent welfare attitudes. While scoring higher than respondents from the liberal regimes on market-based measures, they paradoxically record similarly high scores (comparable to social-democratic regimes) on state-based measures. On one criterion -attribution of inequality to external causes -Israeli respondents even score higher than respondents from both liberal and social-democratic regimes. We consider potential explanations for this ambivalence and suggest possible directions for further research.

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