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References
- Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin, Madison, William Anthony Gamson, Boston College, Massachusetts, Jürgen Gerhards, Universität Leipzig, Dieter Rucht, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung
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- Shaping Abortion Discourse
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- 15 December 2009
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- 16 September 2002, pp 325-338
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Shaping Abortion Discourse
- Democracy and the Public Sphere in Germany and the United States
- Myra Marx Ferree, William Anthony Gamson, Jürgen Gerhards, Dieter Rucht
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- 15 December 2009
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- 16 September 2002
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Using controversy over abortion as a lens through which to compare the political process and role of the media in these two very different democracies, this book examines the contest over meaning that is being waged by social movements, political parties, churches and other social actors. Abortion is a critical battleground for debates over social values in both countries, but the constitutional premises on which arguments rest differ, as do the strategies that movements and parties adopt and the opportunities for influence that are open to them. By examining how these debates are conducted and by whom in light of the normative claims made by democratic theorists, the book also offers a means of judging how well either country lives up to the ideals of democratic debate in practice.
13 - Lessons for Democracy and the Public Sphere
- Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin, Madison, William Anthony Gamson, Boston College, Massachusetts, Jürgen Gerhards, Universität Leipzig, Dieter Rucht, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung
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- Shaping Abortion Discourse
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- 15 December 2009
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- 16 September 2002, pp 286-304
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Understanding the complexities of discourse about abortion policy in Germany and the United States has been a challenge. We leave it to the reader to judge how well we have met it. Ultimately, we are interested in using this study of abortion as a tool for addressing a broader set of questions about democracy and the public sphere. These questions focus on the processes by which the practices of newspapers and the activities of groups and individuals, in and out of political institutions, interact to provide a public discourse about policy issues and the quality of the outcome that they produce, evaluated by several competing standards in normative democratic theory. In this concluding chapter, we review what we learned about the dynamics that generate a discourse about abortion and the nature of this discourse in both countries, focusing on the implications for political discourse more generally.
In our model, media discourse on any issue is shaped by more or less organized collective actors of different types who sponsor certain preferred frames. Their resources, connections, skills, and choices about framing strategy influence their standing and the relative prominence of their frames in the media. Organizational and strategic decisions can make a difference in the career of the frame that they sponsor in ways that are reflected in changing its prominence in the mass media forum.
The actors do not contest frames on a neutral or level arena, but on a complicated terrain. The playing field is uneven and littered with obstacles, some of which may impede certain actors more than others, and it changes over time as decisions are reached and policies put in place.
1 - Two Related Stories
- Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin, Madison, William Anthony Gamson, Boston College, Massachusetts, Jürgen Gerhards, Universität Leipzig, Dieter Rucht, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung
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- Shaping Abortion Discourse
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- 15 December 2009
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- 16 September 2002, pp 3-23
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Es [das sich im Mutterleib entwickelnde Leben] genieβt grundsätzlich für die gesamte Dauer der Schwangerschaft Vorrang vor dem Selbstbestimmungsrecht der Schwangeren. It [the life developing in the mother's body] fundamentally takes priority over the pregnant woman's right to self-determination throughout the entire period of pregnancy.
(German Constitutional Court 1975, BVerG 1, 44)The right to privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action or in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of the rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.
(Roe v. Wade 1973, 410 U.S. 177)At the beginning of a new century, Germany and the United States have arrived at uneasy policy compromises on the vexed issue of abortion. The compromises are in some regards surprisingly similar: In Germany, a woman with an unwanted pregnancy can decide to have an abortion in the first trimester, although she is required to have counseling designed to encourage her to have the child. Access to abortion is relatively simple after a short waiting period. In the United States, the choice of abortion also rests with the woman in the first trimester. The 50 individual states may impose various restrictions as long as these do not place an undue burden on the woman's decision to end an unwanted pregnancy.
In other respects, the situations are sharply different. The similarity of practical outcomes is surprising because the public discussion of abortion and the constellation of actors attempting to shape it provide dramatic contrasts.
2 - Historical Context
- Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin, Madison, William Anthony Gamson, Boston College, Massachusetts, Jürgen Gerhards, Universität Leipzig, Dieter Rucht, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung
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- Shaping Abortion Discourse
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- 16 September 2002, pp 24-44
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If Germany and the United States have reached somewhat similar compromises on abortion policy, they have arrived there by quite different historical paths. In this chapter we trace the paths by which law and policy were shaped in each country over the past century. Perhaps the most fundamental difference is that Germany went through intense debates on abortion in the first third of the twentieth century while the United States witnessed what Luker (1984) aptly labeled a “century of silence.”
Abortion emerged (or, in the case of Germany, reemerged) as a controversial public issue in the last third of the twentieth century. We will review the “critical discourse moments” that have occurred in both countries during the contemporary period. Critical discourse moments are events that stimulate news articles and commentary in various public forums – in this case, especially legislative actions and court decisions. These events sometimes change the discursive opportunity structure and, therefore, necessarily require the would-be players to interpret the event in terms of their preferred frame and, in some cases, to reevaluate their discursive strategy.
PROLOGUE
UNITED STATES
In the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, abortion was largely unregulated in the United States, especially before “quickening.” It was not a matter to be discussed openly in public although abortion providers advertised their services in coded form (see Olasky 1988). A movement in the last third of the century changed this situation, making abortion illegal except under special circumstances.
This movement was part of a broader effort by physicians to secure their medical authority against the competition of other healers by delegitimizing them as “quacks” and “charlatans.”
9 - Representing the Tradition of the Left
- Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin, Madison, William Anthony Gamson, Boston College, Massachusetts, Jürgen Gerhards, Universität Leipzig, Dieter Rucht, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung
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- Shaping Abortion Discourse
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- 15 December 2009
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- 16 September 2002, pp 179-200
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Choice requires the elimination of racism and economic discrimination, so all groups can make parenting decisions equally unrestricted by concerns for economic survival and quality of life.
(Pamphlet, Boston R2N2)218 ist ein Paragraph, der immer nur die Armen traf. [218 is a clause, that on the poor, exerts its claws. More literally: §218 is a legal clause that always has only affected the poor.]
(chant by feminist protesters, 1970).Social issues were and are raised by both the political left and right. However, whereas the right tended to consider the problems of poverty essentially as a matter of private and state charity, the left claimed social justice as a right. Hence, the imagined community of potential supporters of justice claims can be found in what Flacks (1988) calls “the tradition of the left”:
Radical democracy, populism, socialism, communism, syndicalism, anarcho-communism, pacifism – all of these are labels for ideologies and organized political forces that, despite their manifold differences and mutual hostilities, have espoused a common idea. … It is useful to label all forces … that have sought to democratize politics, institutions, or culture and have sought to encourage relatively powerless groups to intervene in history as the “tradition of the left”
(1988, p. 7).Flacks does not use the concepts of collective identity or imagined community to discuss the adherents of this tradition, but he is clearly thinking in such terms.
Part III - Representing Different Constituencies
- Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin, Madison, William Anthony Gamson, Boston College, Massachusetts, Jürgen Gerhards, Universität Leipzig, Dieter Rucht, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung
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- Shaping Abortion Discourse
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- 15 December 2009
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- 16 September 2002, pp 129-130
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This part explores the representation of the discursive interests of three major constituencies on the abortion issue. We examine who makes claims on behalf of each constituency – and their relative success in shaping abortion discourse. In Chapter Seven, we look at who attempts to represent women's claims. In both countries, there is an active women's movement that seeks to connect abortion rights to women's rights, but the movements differ in significant ways and have differential success. We examine both the voice that women have as speakers in the media discourse and the career of gendered frames sponsored by different mediators. We find that abortion is a more gender-polarized and gender-identified issue in Germany than in the United States, and has been from the very beginning of the period that we study.
Chapter Eight examines the nature of the religious constituency and the relative success of those promoting religious frames in shaping the abortion discourse. We particularly focus on the churches, active in both countries, and on the successful mobilization of the Christian Right constituency in the United States. U.S. speakers invoke religious pluralism and the diversity of moral values to legitimate choice, while German speakers assume a moral consensus from which they are more or less willing to countenance exceptions. There is also less ambivalence in Germany about the state as the guardian of morality and as a moral actor.
Chapter Nine considers the tradition of the left, a constituency that emphasizes inequality based on class, race, or ethnicity as well as gender and responds in terms of meeting needs and supporting autonomy for disadvantaged groups as well as making claims for social justice.
Foreword by Friedhelm Neidhardt
- Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin, Madison, William Anthony Gamson, Boston College, Massachusetts, Jürgen Gerhards, Universität Leipzig, Dieter Rucht, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung
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- Shaping Abortion Discourse
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- 15 December 2009
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- 16 September 2002, pp xi-xiv
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Shaping Abortion Discourse supplies the reader with a highly condensed product of a long and complicated research process that generated a great mass of data. Literally thousands of newspaper articles and hundreds of documents about the abortion conflict in Germany and the United States were systematically analyzed, and thousands of speakers, utterances, and ideas were identified and interpreted. In addition, many interviews with actors and observers of the abortion issue were carried out. All of this covered an almost three-decade period of public abortion discourse in two countries, carried out by a U.S./German research team with the idea that in the end a monograph should be jointly written to present the core results of the comparative research.
The demand for consensus set by this ambitious goal required an unusual level of transatlantic cooperation. The “same codebook for content analysis, the same survey questionnaire, and to some extent the same interview schedule” had to be designed and agreed upon. Working with these instruments brought up many practical questions that had to be solved with balanced procedures on both sides. And because data produced by these procedures do not speak for themselves, a difficult and sometimes controversial discussion among the authors about the cross-cultural meaning of these data had to be carried out in order to develop a single line of describing and interpreting the research findings.
At the beginning, I myself was heavily involved in the research project. Then I was elected to an office that so much absorbed my capacity that I was not able to stay on as a member of the research team.
Tables and Figures
- Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin, Madison, William Anthony Gamson, Boston College, Massachusetts, Jürgen Gerhards, Universität Leipzig, Dieter Rucht, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung
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- Shaping Abortion Discourse
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- 16 September 2002, pp ix-x
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Methodological Appendix
- Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin, Madison, William Anthony Gamson, Boston College, Massachusetts, Jürgen Gerhards, Universität Leipzig, Dieter Rucht, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung
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- Shaping Abortion Discourse
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- 16 September 2002, pp 305-324
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A copy of the complete codebook used in the content analysis, including detailed instructions to coders on how to handle ambiguous statements, is available at www.ssc.wisc.edu/abortionstudy. This Web site also includes additional data on our procedures for sampling articles, a complete list of the German and U.S. organizations surveyed, the questionnaire used in the survey of organizations, and some of the data sets used in our various analyses.
The brief appendix provided here, which complements our Chapter Three on methods, lists the spokespersons and journalists whom we interviewed. It also provides a short summary that the reader may use to gain a better idea of how we operationalized a number of key variables. But for a full exposition with examples, consult the Web site listed.
The following appendix has three main sections, outlining first the persons with whom we conducted interviews, then the main ideas that were represented in each of the eight frames in all three specific directions in the content analysis, and then the particular cross-frame clusters of ideas that were used to create other variables.
THE INTENSIVE INTERVIEWS
As described in Chapter Three, we completed interviews with spokespersons for selected U.S. and German organizations (aside from state agencies) who were involved, directly or indirectly, in shaping abortion discourse (for the selection criteria, see Chapter Three). We also interviewed a small number of journalists who frequently wrote on abortion for the newspapers in our sample.
Glossary
- Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin, Madison, William Anthony Gamson, Boston College, Massachusetts, Jürgen Gerhards, Universität Leipzig, Dieter Rucht, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung
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- Shaping Abortion Discourse
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- 16 September 2002, pp xix-xx
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12 - Metatalk
- Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin, Madison, William Anthony Gamson, Boston College, Massachusetts, Jürgen Gerhards, Universität Leipzig, Dieter Rucht, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung
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- Shaping Abortion Discourse
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- 16 September 2002, pp 255-285
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Here we examine metatalk – discourse about discourse. What do participants see when they step back and observe the very discourse that they are involved in shaping? Their subjective view of media coverage of the abortion issue has its own reality, especially when it is widely shared.
We have observations from two different kinds of participants here: journalists and spokespersons for advocacy organizations. Journalists in our newspaper samples often write about the discourse, both in news accounts and commentaries. We have culled their observations looking for implied standards of quality. In addition, we have interviews with a small number of American and German journalists who have frequently written on one or more aspects of the abortion issue for the newspapers in our sample. The interviews solicit their observations on the abortion discourse and on how they and their colleagues have performed. Advocates are sometimes quoted in the media, commenting on the discourse rather than on abortion per se. In addition, we have their responses to interviews that focus on their perceptions of the media.
Metatalk examines a discourse with an implicit set of normative standards – that is, it praises or condemns from the standpoint of some often-unstated ideal that is used to assess what is observed. We examine two questions here: (a) What are the similarities and differences in the normative standards in Germany and the United States? and (b) To what extent are these normative standards congruent with the criteria from democratic theory discussed in the last two chapters?
COMMON STANDARDS
Some normative standards are shared even though those who comment on them may see them as being met in different ways and to different degrees.
Part IV - The Quality of Abortion Discourse
- Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin, Madison, William Anthony Gamson, Boston College, Massachusetts, Jürgen Gerhards, Universität Leipzig, Dieter Rucht, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung
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- Shaping Abortion Discourse
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- 16 September 2002, pp 201-204
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In the previous three chapters we looked at various outcomes in media discourse and addressed which actors were competing and with what success in shaping these outcomes. We showed how their discursive strategies were themselves influenced by the contours of the complicated playing field on which they competed – the discursive opportunity structure – as well as by strategic choices that they made to position themselves in this field. Part of the problem faced by all of these actors was discursively to construct a constituency for themselves – women, the religious, the left – as well as to address this constructed public in ways that would advance the policy positions that they favored. In both Germany and the United States, the abortion debate has changed in character over time as different groups have achieved more standing and certain ideas have come to be more or less favored than others.
Using the concept of a discursive opportunity structure, we suggested that the chances for different groups and points of views to be heard were structured differently in each country. The institutionalized position of the parties and the churches, the state-centered coverage of news events, the language of the high court's constitutional decision, and the formal organizations and cultural traditions associated with class and gender politics all combine to give systematic advantages to certain speakers and ways of framing abortion in Germany. Similarly, we found that the suspicion of the state, the dominance of interest group politics over formal parties, traditions of religious pluralism, and the privacy centered language of the Supreme Court provided advantages to a very different constellation of voices in the United States.
3 - Methods
- Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin, Madison, William Anthony Gamson, Boston College, Massachusetts, Jürgen Gerhards, Universität Leipzig, Dieter Rucht, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung
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- Shaping Abortion Discourse
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- 16 September 2002, pp 45-58
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Our research findings are based on an unusually complicated data set, using multiple methods, including content analysis of newspapers and organizational documents, a survey of organizations, and intensive interviews. In this chapter we attempt to provide the general reader with enough information to assess its strengths and limitations. Important details for those with methodological interests are relegated to an appendix and to the Web (www.ssc.wisc.edu/abortionstudy).
THE CONTENT ANALYSIS
Our two major outcome variables – standing and framing – are both based on a content analysis of two major newspapers in each country. In the United States, we sampled The New York Times (NYT) and The Los Angeles Times (LAT); for Germany, we sampled the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) and the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ). These newspapers are similar in targeting a national rather than a more regional audience and in being oriented toward policy-making elites. While they all cover national news, the papers we chose in each country also cover different geographical regions, giving us a way to pick up different local events, actors, and frames. We were not interested in differences between newspapers but in producing a data set that was independent of the possible idiosyncrasies of any single source. While we would have liked to include tabloids, TV, and magazine coverage, we discovered that many sources, particularly in Germany, were not archived as far back as we wished to go. We decided to focus on a narrower range of media for a longer period to focus on the comparative analysis of changes over time.
4 - The Discursive Opportunity Structure
- Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin, Madison, William Anthony Gamson, Boston College, Massachusetts, Jürgen Gerhards, Universität Leipzig, Dieter Rucht, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung
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- Shaping Abortion Discourse
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- 16 September 2002, pp 61-85
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In 1931, a lively framing contest over abortion policy in Germany reached a peak. Hundreds of new groups were created, and there were more than 1000 local demonstrations in support of lessening or removing legal restrictions on abortion, with appropriate coverage in the mass media of the day. Move the clock forward two years, after the Nazis seized power, and the whole scene seems unimaginable. The playing field in which any framing contest about abortion that was being waged was so radically different that the once taken-for-granted became unthinkable. The idea that one could further abortion reform through mass demonstrations and public discourse might as well have come from the moon.
Under the new regime, abortion was framed as a tool for “race hygiene” (Czarnowski 1997; Koonz 1986). Coercive sterilization and abortion were means for preventing inferior races from reproducing. Aryan women, in contrast, had a responsibility to the state to reproduce, and abortion was a criminal act. In 1943, a woman who had more than one abortion was threatened with capital punishment for “repeatedly undermining the vitality (Lebenskraft) of the German people.” No alternative frames were permitted in this arena (Koonz 1986).
The shift from the Weimar Republic to the Nazi regime is an extreme case of a changing context for abortion discourse. The differences between the United States and Germany and the changes over the past 30 years are certainly less dramatic.
5 - Standing
- Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin, Madison, William Anthony Gamson, Boston College, Massachusetts, Jürgen Gerhards, Universität Leipzig, Dieter Rucht, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung
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- Shaping Abortion Discourse
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- 16 September 2002, pp 86-104
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Not every actor has an equal chance to have a voice in public discourse. Not only are some actors better prepared and motivated to speak out on a particular topic, but the customary practices of news gathering make some speakers highly salient to the media while others are less so. By standing, we mean having a voice in the media.
The concept comes from legal discourse, where it refers to the right of a person or group to challenge in a judicial forum the conduct of another. Rather than a matter of clear definition, legal standing is a battleground. By analogy, media standing is also contested terrain. In news accounts, it refers to gaining the status of a media source whose interpretations are directly or indirectly quoted.
Standing is not the same as being covered or mentioned in the news; a group may be in the news in the sense that it is described or criticized but has no opportunity to provide interpretation and meaning to the events in which it is involved. Standing refers to a group being treated as an agent, not merely as an object being discussed by others.
From the standpoint of most journalists who are attempting to be “objective,” the granting of standing is anything but arbitrary. Sources are selected, in this view, because they speak as or for serious players in any given policy domain: individuals or groups who have enough political power to make a potential difference in what happens. Most journalists would insist that their choice of sources to quote has nothing at all to do with their personal attitudes toward those sources.
Index
- Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin, Madison, William Anthony Gamson, Boston College, Massachusetts, Jürgen Gerhards, Universität Leipzig, Dieter Rucht, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung
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- Shaping Abortion Discourse
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- 16 September 2002, pp 339-350
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7 - Representing Women's Claims
- Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin, Madison, William Anthony Gamson, Boston College, Massachusetts, Jürgen Gerhards, Universität Leipzig, Dieter Rucht, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung
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- Shaping Abortion Discourse
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- 15 December 2009
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- 16 September 2002, pp 131-153
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Since women are the only people who can experience the existential crisis of an unwanted pregnancy, it may seem self-evident that women have a special claim on the issue of abortion. Such claims, however, do not appear spontaneously and are not foreordained. Whether, when, and how gender claims are mobilized and made politically relevant is a matter of the discursive opportunities available, as well as the strategies and activities of specific actors in utilizing them. It may seem “natural” for women to have a distinctive position on abortion politics, but such positions grow from historically contingent mobilization processes that select gender as a relevant dimension for aggregating diverse interests and values (Solinger 1998).
Gender as a concept does not just mean women, or the social differences between women and men, but rather “gender is a constituitive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power” (Scott 1986, p. 1067). To define men and women as categories of people with different understandings and interests means to minimize both the similarities between genders and the considerable variances within each. The meaning of gender is shaped by culture, time period, social location, and the nature of the issue.
Even when gender is, in fact, shaping experiences in major ways, it may not be recognized as a meaningful category and its significance may be socially ignored (as in the United States in the 1950s).
11 - Measuring the Quality of Discourse
- Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin, Madison, William Anthony Gamson, Boston College, Massachusetts, Jürgen Gerhards, Universität Leipzig, Dieter Rucht, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung
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- Shaping Abortion Discourse
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- 16 September 2002, pp 232-254
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In this chapter we analyze empirically the three sets of questions raised in the previous chapter – who speaks, how and what they communicate, and what is the outcome of the discourse – to compare the extent to which the normative criteria of the different theoretical traditions are met in Germany and the United States.
THE INCLUSION ISSUE
Who speaks? We have already operationalized this with the concept of standing and have largely answered it in Chapter Five (summarized in Table 5.1). State and party actors are 75% of the speakers in Germany compared to 40% in the United States. The residual 25% in Germany is given over mainly to the Catholic and Lutheran churches and to experts, with a negligible 2% going to Pro and Anti movement organizations. The discourse focuses heavily on legislative and judicial actions, keeping citizens well informed about what their representatives are doing. This discourse looks very much like what the representative liberal model would consider ideal.
In the United States, in contrast, state and party actors are a minority and Pro and Anti movement organizations make up about one-quarter of all speakers. The U.S. newspapers are three times as likely as German newspapers to quote individuals who are not spokespersons for anyone but themselves. U.S. discourse is slightly higher in including experts (6%, versus 4% in Germany), but experts are practically the only individuals who are quoted in Germany. They are only 40% of the individuals with standing in the United States.
Frontmatter
- Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin, Madison, William Anthony Gamson, Boston College, Massachusetts, Jürgen Gerhards, Universität Leipzig, Dieter Rucht, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung
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- Shaping Abortion Discourse
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- 15 December 2009
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- 16 September 2002, pp i-vi
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