The effects of episodic and thematic framing on the attribution of responsibility for societal problems have previously been investigated with experimental methods and mostly tested general effects on the public. The current work, instead, investigates episodic framing’s effect by linking a large-scale content analysis to data of a panel survey (n = 3,270) and assesses the conditionality upon citizens’ individual political ideology. It does so with a focus on perceptions of responsibility for the 2009–2015 economic crisis and within the context of the Netherlands. Results demonstrate that exposure to episodically framed crisis news caused a decline in the attribution of responsibility to individual citizens, whereas thematic framing did not affect this. Framing effects on the attribution of political responsibility, instead, were conditional on political ideology: Episodic framing decreased the attribution of political responsibility, whereas thematic framing increased the attribution of responsibility to political actors, but both effects occurred primarily among citizens with a right-wing political-economic ideology. Accordingly, we add an explanation for the inconsistency of effect directions in previously published research on the effects that episodic and thematic framing may have on responsibility attributions.

先前已经通过实验方法研究了情景框架和主题框架对社会问题责任归因的影响，并且大多测试了对公众的总体影响。相反，当前的工作是通过将大规模内容分析与面板调查的数据（n = 3,270）联系起来来研究情节框架的作用，并评估公民个人政治意识形态的条件性。这样做的重点是在荷兰背景下对2009-2015年经济危机的责任感。结果表明，暴露于突发事件的危机新闻导致下降责任归于公民个人，而主题框架并没有影响这一点。相反，对政治责任归属的框架效应取决于政治意识形态：情节框架降低了政治责任的归属，而主题框架则增加了对政治行为者的责任归属，但是这两种效应主要发生在有右翼的公民中政治经济意识形态。因此，我们在先前发表的关于情节和主题框架可能对责任归因产生影响的研究中添加了对影响方向不一致的解释。