Framing referendum campaigns: the 2014 Scottish independence referendum in the press

Abstract

This article explores the framing of referendum campaigns in the press and its relationship to the framing of elections. Drawing from an empirical analysis of the newspaper coverage of the 2014 Scottish referendum and from previous research on campaigns in different contexts, it finds that frames associated with elections, like the 'strategic game' and policy frames, were also dominant in the framing of the referendum. It argues that by framing the independence debate in similar terms to other political contests, the press promoted an understanding of this event as being about pragmatic decision-making on policy and political competition, rather than purely a decision about constitutional matters of self-determination.Keywords: Referendum, framing, content analysis, newspapers, Scotland, media coverage.Referendums are different political events from elections: they are not competitions between political parties to come into power but essentially consultations of the electorate on a divisive issue that goes beyond the lifespan of individual governments; they are one-offs, not regular events; there is not always clear correspondence between party identification and ideological stance and parties with diverse ideologies may support the same side (de Vreese and Semetko, 2004a).Although research on news coverage of election campaigns has been ongoing since the 1940s (Patterson, 1980), the coverage of referendums in the news is comparatively an under-researched area (de Vreese and Semetko, 2004b: 714). This article uses frame analysis, a method that has made a substantial contribution to our understanding of election coverage, to look at the way the 2014 Scottish referendum on independence from the United Kingdom was represented in a range of Scottish newspapers. Drawing from the analysis of the specific case and reflecting on previous studies of campaigns on other topics and national contexts, it addresses the following question: did the press coverage of the referendum generate different frames compared to those of election campaigns, as would be justified by the different nature of these political events? The findings have implications both for our understanding of referendums as mediated events and for evaluating the performance of the news media in explaining what a referendum is about. This latter is particularly significant because the media are for most people a key source of information on politics, and how they define referendums matters (Wettstein, 2012). Despite the dramatic decline of the print press internationally and in Scotland specifically (Dekavalla, 2015), it remains a significant part of the 'relay race' of discourses in the public sphere (Garton et al., 1991: 100-103), whereby print, broadcast and online media co-create the mediated public debate and re-represent political discourse on different platforms. The 2014 referendum has been hailed as an occasion where grassroots groups reinvigorated the debate on social media and challenged the dominance of traditional news platforms (Law, 20...

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“…Furthermore, politicians on both sides of the Scottish constitutional debate made regular use of the print and electronic press to disseminate their particular political messages and debate points (Dekavalla, 2016;Mullen, 2014).…”

“…With this in mind, both tabloid and broadsheet newspapers from England (the In the Scottish context, the Herald was selected as an example of a left-of centre editorial position, whereas The Scotsman is reflective of a centre-right political stance (Hutchison, 2008;Dekavalla, 2016). Furthermore, the inclusion of the Herald in the sample also allowed for the inclusion of its Sunday edition, the Sunday Herald, which was the only 'national newspaper' which explicitly supported Scottish independence (Dekavalla, 2016).…”

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