Amber Boydstun
 Dept of Political Science
 Univ of California, Davis
 One Shields Ave
 Davis, CA 95616

 aboydstun[at]ucdavis[dot]edu

I am an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Davis. I hold a Ph.D. in political science from Penn 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. Among the many variables that affect front-page attention, I give special consideration to the scope of an issue debate -- that is, how narrowly concentrated or broadly dispersed the policy debate is across the component dimensions of the issue. The broader the scope of an issue debate, I argue, the more attention the issue will receive. I test my theory using an original data set consisting of all New York Times front-page articles, 1996-2006 (about 33,000 stories in all). I develop empirical models predicting the amount of monthly front-page attention a policy issue receives as a function of several explanatory variables, including: the scope of the debate; the level of agenda congestion; the amount of attention given to the issue in the previous time period; the amount of contemporaneous attention given to the issue by Congress, the President, and the public; and contextual factors such as the time to the next Presidential election. Each of these variables demonstrates a strong influence on the amount of front-page attention a policy issue receives. In particular, the significant effect exhibited by the scope of the debate reveals 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 Linn, The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence, published by Cambridge University Press in 2008 and winner of the 2008 Gladys M. Kammerer Award for the best political science publication in the field of U.S. national policy. 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 2008 Mass Communication and Society article, "Media Framing of Capital Punishment and Its Impact on Individuals' Cognitive Responses." And we take a closer look at the effects of media framing of the death penalty on the number of people sentenced to death, controlling for death row exonerations, in the chapter we contributed to Brian Schaffner and Patrick Seller's edited volume forthcoming from Routledge entitled Winning with Words: The Origin and Impact of Framing.