Amber Boydstun
 Dept of Political Science
 219 Pond Laboratory
 Penn State University
 University Park, PA 16802

 aboydstun[at]psu[dot]edu

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at The Pennsylvania State University. My research focuses on the valuable but scarce resource of political attention. I specialize in agenda-setting (the distribution of attention across issues), issue-framing (the distribution of attention across dimensions within an issue debate), and the causal links between these two dynamic processes.

My dissertation examines how policy issues become front-page news. I develop a theory to explain how front-page attention gets distributed across issues and how this distribution changes over time. In particular, I argue that the amount of attention an issue receives at a given point in time can be predicted as a function of issue characteristics, context characteristics, the level of overall agenda concentration, and how the issue is framed. I test the effects of each of these variables on media coverage through use of an original data set consisting of all New York Times front-page articles, 1996-2006 (about 33,000 stories in all). I model the number of front-page stories each policy issue receives each month as a function of these explanatory variables, giving special focus to the hypothesis that the more diverse the framing of an issue, the more stories it should receive. My findings offer strong support for this hypothesis. I find that how issues are talked about on the front page directly influences how much they are talked about.

In addition to my dissertation work, I am co-author of a book on framing with Frank Baumgartner and Suzanna De Boef, The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in January 2008. This book, part of an ongoing project studying framing in the U.S. death penalty debate, traces changes in media framing of capital punishment from 1960 through 2005 and demonstrates the significant effects framing has had both on public support for the death penalty and on the actual number of death sentences. We also document individual-level framing effects in the case of the death penalty and offer evidence that "not all frames are equal" in our forthcoming Mass Communication and Society article, "Media Framing of Capital Punishment and Its Impact on Individuals' Cognitive Responses."