Publication type
Journal Article
Authors
Publication date
May 27, 2026
Summary:
The European Union faces long-term governance challenges in contested domains, such as migration management, health data sharing, and facial recognition technology. Across these fields, political debates are shaped by shifting ways in which actors frame problems and solutions. Understanding how such framing contests evolve over time is crucial for explaining both integration dynamics and the capacity of EU institutions to govern effectively. This article develops the mathematical foundations of a comparative approach to frame evolution by extending discourse network analysis, acknowledging the relational nature of collective action framing. Partitioning trajectories into distinct states and phases reveals key types of frame evolution: progressive versus regressive, entangled versus disentangled, and fast-paced versus slow. This typology provides a basis for linking framing dynamics to EU integration and policymaking processes. The article makes three contributions: operationalising collective framing trajectories; introducing a temporal kernel smoothing approach; and identifying comparative dimensions across policy debates.
Published in
JCMS : Journal of Common Market Studies
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.70119
ISSN
00219886
Subjects
Notes
Online Early
© 2026 The Author(s). JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Open Access
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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