Since Rein and Schön developed their approach to policy framing analysis in the1990s, a range of approaches to policy framing have emerged to inform our understanding of policy processes. Prior attempts to illuminate the diversity of approaches to framing in public policy have largely “stayed in their lane,” making distinctions in approaches within shared epistemic communities. The aim in this paper is to map different approaches to framing used in policy sciences journals, to articulate what each contributes to the understanding of the policy process, and to provide a heuristic to aid in deciding how to use the diverse approaches in framing analysis and to further the dialogue across different approaches. To develop the heuristic, we manually coded and analyzed 68 articles published between 1997 and 2018 using “frame” or “framing” in their title or abstract from four policy journals: Critical Policy Studies, Journal of European Public Policy, Policy Sciences, and Policy Studies Journal. We identified five approaches, which we label: sensemaking, discourse, contestation, explanatory and institutional. We have found that these approaches do not align with a simple binary between interpretive and positivist but show variation, particularly along the lines of aims, methodology and methods. In the discussion, we suggest that these five approaches raise four key questions that animate framing studies in policy analysis: (1) Do frames influence policies or are policies manifestations of framing? (2) What is the role of frame contestation in policy conflict? (3) How can the study of frames or framing reveal unheard voices? And (4) how do certain frames/framings become dominant? By introducing these questions, we offer a fresh way scholars might discuss frames and framing in the policy sciences across approaches, to highlight the distinct yet complementary ways they illuminate policy processes.

自从 Rein 和 Schön 在 20 世纪 90 年代开发了政策框架分析方法以来，一系列政策框架方法已经出现，以帮助我们理解政策过程。先前试图阐明公共政策框架方法多样性的尝试基本上“停留在自己的轨道上”，在共享的认知社区内对方法进行了区分。本文的目的是绘制政策科学期刊中使用的不同框架方法，阐明每种方法对理解政策过程的贡献，并提供启发式方法来帮助决定如何在框架分析和框架中使用不同的方法。促进跨不同方法的对话。为了开发启发式方法，我们对 1997 年至 2018 年间发表的 68 篇文章进行了手动编码和分析，这些文章的标题或摘要中使用了“frame”或“framing”，这些文章来自四种政策期刊：《批判政策研究》、《欧洲公共政策杂志》、《政策科学》和《政策》。研究杂志。我们确定了五种方法，并将其标记为：意义建构、话语、争论、解释和制度。我们发现这些方法并不符合解释主义和实证主义之间的简单二元关系，而是表现出变化，特别是在目标、方法论和方法方面。在讨论中，我们建议这五种方法提出了四个关键问题，激发了政策分析中的框架研究：（1）框架影响政策还是政策是框架的表现？ （2）框架之争在政策冲突中的作用是什么？ （3）框架或框架的研究如何揭示未曾听到的声音？ (4) 某些框架/框架如何成为主导？ 通过引入这些问题，我们为学者们提供了一种新的方式，可以跨方法讨论政策科学中的框架和框架，以强调他们阐明政策过程的独特但互补的方式。