ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Polit. Sci.
Sec. Political Science Methodologies
Measuring Citizen Frames and their Integration in the International Policy Process: A Hybrid BERTopic Modelling Approach
Provisionally accepted
- 1Center for Women’s Empowerment & Gender Equality, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amritapuri, India, Kollam, India
- 2Department of Global Economics and Management, Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands, Groningen, Netherlands
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Governments and international organizations are exploring new ways of engaging citizens in the policy design process, however scalable ways to test whether citizen frames appear in resulting policies documents remain limited. We present a hybrid BERTopic modelling approach that extracts frames from short, open-ended citizens' responses and evaluates their uptake in policy texts by mapping model topics to the Boydstun Policy Frames taxonomy. We demonstrate how heterogeneity in citizen framing across demographic and socioeconomic groups can be measured, offering policymakers a way to account for these differences when drafting inclusive policy documents. We illustrate the method using the Civil 20 India 2023 International Grassroots Survey (2,846 respondents across 64 countries) and the G20 New Delhi Leaders' Declaration. Our findings suggest only moderate alignment between citizens perspectives and the policy document. The sharpest divergence concerns citizens' emphasis on the quality-of-life and morality frames, which are largely absent from the outcomes of policy deliberations. Conversely, the policy text leans toward future-oriented, technology centered solutions, while citizens emphasize immediate essentials such as safety and decent wages. The contribution is a generalizable workflow for measuring citizen frames in short texts and assessing their policy uptake, which can be used as a diagnostic tool for auditing democratic responsiveness in global governance.
Keywords: Frame, framing, Citizen participation, global governance, international policy, BERTopic, Topic modelling, computational text analysis
Received: 29 Sep 2025; Accepted: 17 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Ustenko, Fakkel, Witt, Sahib, Sheshadri and Rao R. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Victoria Ustenko
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