Explaining Frame Variation

While social movement scholars have added immeasurably to our knowledge of activist framing, few researchers analyze the circumstances leading to variation in the frames articulated by movement actors. In this study, I explore an important and understudied form of frame variation, whether activists use more moderate or more radical frames. Using framing data from the early twentieth-century U.S. women's jury movements, I first show that activists offered both a more traditional and moderate difference frame, arguing that women should be permitted on juries because they would provide a unique female perspective in jury deliberations, and a more radical equality frame, stating that women had an equal right to sit on juries and they were as intellectually capable as men to do so. Second, I demonstrate that a combination of circumstances explains whether the jury activists were likely to articulate more moderate or more radical arguments. I find that frame variation is driven by activist organizational identities, a cultural and political resonance process, and a counterframing process. Findings from multinomial and binary logistic regression analyses reveal that all three processes influenced jury activist framing.