Beyond Evidence: How Framing Shapes Public Health Policies During Health Crises

ABSTRACT

Does the level of evidence that accompanies policy action depend on how a problem is framed, and on who frames it? This article examines these questions in the context of health crises. Bridging sociological and equivalence framing theories, it treats frames as preexisting interpretive schemes shared within communities of actors, whose downstream influence depends on the information available. Using a comprehensive textual database of COVID‐19 press conferences held in Quebec, where political decision‐makers held greater authority, and in Sweden, where scientists enjoyed more autonomy, the study combines natural language processing, OLS regressions, and Granger causality tests to analyze how frames and disclosed evidence were articulated with suppression and mitigation policies. Findings show that in Quebec, framing the pandemic as an imminent danger was associated with far‐reaching suppression measures even at low levels of disclosed evidence, while the moderate frame's association with mitigation strengthened as evidence increased. In Sweden, no relationship between framing and suppression policies appeared in public communications; framing instead operated jointly with evidence, the dangerous frame being associated with fewer mitigation references mainly at high levels of disclosed evidence. These results suggest that the relevant question is not how much evidence policy action requires, but by whom that evidence is required, and under what conditions. The evidentiary threshold attached to a frame appears to be a property of the community that carries it, with direct implications for how democratic institutions allocate influence between accountability and expertise.