Kushner (2005) argue that the most effective framing concerned portraying Iraq as part of
the 9/11 attacks and essential to the global war against terrorism; this interpretation
apparently considers hyped threats about nuclear capabilities to be irrelevant.
Nevertheless, we hypothesize that nuclear threats result in greater demand for military
intervention.
Issues in Experimental Design
Experimental studies in political science often produce frustratingly weak results
because participants bring a great deal of “context” with them into the lab. Framing
studies are particularly prone to this problem since extant frames may already dominate
the debate regarding a particular subject. Few participants would be unfamiliar with the
“central front in the war on terrorism” frame of Iraq promulgated by the Bush
administration in recent years. Any current framing study on Iraq would have to
accommodate this fact and the prominence of this frame would limit the impact of
counter frames. We might argue that the “framing phrase” of the Iraq war is over and
researchers (interested in Iraq) should turn to other subjects.
One way to avoid the contaminating impact of preexisting attitudes is to engage in
the construction of hypothetical scenarios. In the international relations literature, this has
resulted in the creation of fictitious countries—Algo, Utland, Alland, Doma—(see
Boettcher 1995, 2004) that have no past or current history and are less likely to provoke
an uncontrolled response. These countries are often modeled after real ones and the
scenarios are only thinly veiled historical cases, but that is usually enough to prevent all
but the most knowledgeable undergraduate research subject from discerning the
underlying reality. Detaching these hypothetical countries and scenarios from reality
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Convention