Suchergebnisse

This dissertations pursues three research objectives: (1) map how transnational the online public discourse on the global phenomenon of climate change is, (2) understand the role of the (trans)nationalized online public discourses on climate change in today's hybrid media system, and (3) find, implement, and validate computational methods to study public discourses across different political and language spaces. Devoted to these objectives, the three articles included in this thesis produced the following results: (1) The public discourse on climate change is transnationalized to a considerable degree. First, the same topics define the issue in the countries studied. However, some of the topics are of different importance to the actors in these countries. Second, the discourses in the countries are shaped by both domestic and foreign actors. However, the scope of transnationalization is restricted to countries of the Global North, with a clear bias towards the United States. The Global South is thus a blind spot. (2) For the studied case of Germany, there is no evidence for continuous resonance among climate change skeptics' online communication and legacy media. However, there are occasions of selective resonance when climate change skeptics manage to exploit specific events to push their perspectives and positions onto the mass media's agenda. The influence of the transnational skeptical counter-movement on German mainstream discourse is therefore limited. (3) The combination of machine translation and topic models is a great option when it comes to the automated analysis of large multilingual corpora. Regardless of whether full texts or only the vocabulary of a corpus is translated, the approach produces reliable and robust results. Moreover, the analysis of transnational discourse convergence has shown that machine translation and topic models can also be used for comparative research.

AbstractThe role of the parliamentary arena and members of parliament (MPs) therein for both mainstreaming and cross-sectoral policy integration is largely unknown. Studying the case of Switzerland, this paper analyzes the integration of the biodiversity issue into policies of 20 different policy sectors over a period of 19 years to assess how two specific actor attributes—issue and sector specialization—increase the chances of MPs of engaging in both biodiversity mainstreaming and its cross-sectoral integration. The results based on a comprehensive collection of political documents from the parliamentary arena, and multilevel regression models show that an increase in MPs' sector specialization is associated with both a decrease in mainstreaming and a decrease in cross-sectoral integration activities. By contrast, an increase in issue specialization typically translates into biodiversity-related activity in a larger number of sectors. In the parliamentary arena, therefore, it is primarily a small group of "issue specialists" who take responsibility for the integration of crosscutting issues, such as biodiversity, into critical sectoral policies.

We study the discursive resonance of online climate skepticism in traditional media in Germany, a country where climate skeptics lack public prestige and thus form a political counter-movement. We thereby differentiate two temporal dynamics: resonance can be continuous or selective, based on the exploitation of specific events. Beyond, we test whether such resonance is higher within the conservative media. We rely on news value theory to shed light on the mechanism facilitating or hindering such resonance and identify three indicators for resonance: frames, positions and actors. Using various computational methods as well as qualitative case studies, we examine the skeptical and traditional media discourses over a period of two years. Our analysis shows that there is no continuous resonance. However, our data reveal selective resonance: skeptics' manage to exploit specific events pushing their frames and positions onto traditional media's agenda. Thereby, conservative media did not give greater resonance to climate skeptical voices whereas they resort to downplaying the issue by allocating less space to it.

We seek to understand the role of the Internet in policy monopolies characterized by a dominant coalition in traditional political venues. In these settings, we identify coalitions and counter-coalitions on the Web and ask how these coalitions differ resource-wise and where these differences come from. To do so, we combine link tracing and quantitative content analysis in the field of climate change in Germany and the United Kingdom. Our results show that online contestation is indeed structured by competing coalitions of climate advocates and skeptics. Moreover, the counter-coalitions of climate skeptics turn out to be the true winners of online communication: they have not only incorporated conservative media as their allies, but also managed to make themselves more visible than climate advocates. This visibility stems from their own link setting activity, which makes climate advocates' passive online strategy of just ignoring the skeptical camp ineffective.

We examine how the political context in which actors are embedded relates to their online communication. We argue that the degree of contentiousness of an issue (high vs. low conflict) is a decisive factor in explaining the distinct network structures generated by the actors' hyperlink patterns. Comparing two such networks originating in the United States and Germany in the area of clilmate change, we found systematic differences between them that result in distinct political hyperlink topologies, which reflect the underlying issue context. These differences become visible in the reciprocity of the actors' hyperlink communication, the fragmentation of the networks along the political divide, the recognition issue opponents receive from the media, and the transnational orientation of climate advocates and skeptics. This research implies that hyperlink communication is responsive to the political context, and that countermovements, in particular, manage to reap the benefits from online communication mobilization efforts.

AbstractThe effective conservation and promotion of biodiversity requires its integration into a wide range of sectoral policies. For this to happen, the issue must receive attention across policy sectors. Yet, we know little about how attention to the issue evolves over time and across sectors. Drawing from the literature on environmental policy integration/mainstreaming and policy process theories, we develop competing hypotheses, expecting either increasing or fluctuating attention to the biodiversity issue. We tested the hypotheses using the case of Swiss politics between 1999 and 2018. Applying a combination of computational methods, we analyze the content of a comprehensive collection of policy documents (n ≈ 440,000) attributed to 20 policy sectors. Comparing the sectors, we find that (1) a persistent increase in attention is the exception, (2) if there is an increase in attention, it is likely to be temporary, and (3) the most common pattern is that of invariant attention over time. Biodiversity integration—if it does happen at all—tends to occur in cycles rather than in steady long-term shifts. This implies that the conservation of biodiversity does not follow the cross-sectoral nature of the problem, but is subject to the dynamics of "politics," where actors, because of limited resources, engage with (aspects of) an issue only for a certain amount of time.