Framing Policy Reform in Europe. A Comparative Study of Frame Variation Across Countries, Newspapers, and Time

Politicians must navigate the complexities of social policy reform to ensure sustainable fiscal policies while considering their impact on citizens. News media play a crucial role as a source of political information, influencing public attitudes towards policy changes through selective framing of issues. This study focuses on how European news media frame the controversial policy reform of raising the retirement age, and explores factors that potentially explain variations in framing across contexts. Using a manual content analysis of newspapers in Denmark, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom over the period 2011–2020 (n = 1059 articles), we examine country-, newspaper-, and time-related factors to explain the relative presence of issue-specific diagnostic and prognostic frames in European news coverage of pension reform. While the results show that all three types of factors determine the coverage of the reform measure to some extent, in particular variations across newspapers and over time are prevalent. The most striking differences are that left-leaning newspapers emphasize frames related to inequality, and that over time, framing crystallizes into a more concentrated set of diagnostic and prognostic frames. This article sheds light on European news coverage of a much-debated policy issue and its contextual dependency.