Suchergebnisse

A follow-up study to Brüggemann et al. (2017), The appeasement effect of a United Nations climate summit on the German public Abstract Heat waves occurring around the world, outspoken warnings from scientists, international climate ac-tivism, and ensuing political debates on climate protection have ensured that climate change has finally caught the public's attention. This comparative analysis of public opinion during three UN climate sum-mits illustrates the awakening of public awareness of and an increased willingness to actively engage with climate change, probably as the cumulative effect of this combination of events. Comparing cli-mate change awareness, communicative engagement, knowledge, attitudes, and climate-friendly be-haviour during the 2015 (n = 1,477), 2018 (n = 1,044) and 2019 (n = 1,000) UN climate summits, we find major and consistently positive changes in various forms of active engagement with the issue. These results indicate that the appeasement effect observed in an earlier study during the 2015 Paris summit is over: the German public is now ready to take decisive steps to tackle the climate problem.

Abstract A basic understanding of climate politics is necessary for citizens to assess their government's policies on mitigating and adapting to climate change. However, research on knowledge about climate change has focused on causes and consequences of climate change rather than climate politics. Even less research has focused on the learning process rather than knowledge. Therefore, this study explores which factors influence learning about climate politics from media use and interpersonal communication. We test a set of factors related to the individual respondent and the type of information sources used. Data from a three-month panel survey conducted in the context of the 2015 UN climate conference in Paris (COP21) is analyzed using hierarchical regression analyses. The strongest explanatory factor is prior knowledge – which, in contrast to the knowledge gap hypothesis, makes learning less likely. The most plausible explanation for this ceiling effect is a lack of background information offered in the most widely used journalistic media. Keywords Knowledge acquisition, Panel survey, media effects, climate change, knowledge gap

A follow-up study to Brüggemann et al. (2017), The appeasement effect of a United Nations climate summit on the German public Abstract Heat waves occurring around the world, outspoken warnings from scientists, international climate ac-tivism, and ensuing political debates on climate protection have ensured that climate change has finally caught the public's attention. This comparative analysis of public opinion during three UN climate sum-mits illustrates the awakening of public awareness of and an increased willingness to actively engage with climate change, probably as the cumulative effect of this combination of events. Comparing cli-mate change awareness, communicative engagement, knowledge, attitudes, and climate-friendly be-haviour during the 2015 (n = 1,477), 2018 (n = 1,044) and 2019 (n = 1,000) UN climate summits, we find major and consistently positive changes in various forms of active engagement with the issue. These results indicate that the appeasement effect observed in an earlier study during the 2015 Paris summit is over: the German public is now ready to take decisive steps to tackle the climate problem. Note for version 2: In the original version, one of the tables showed values with a wrong signedness.

Typologies are omnipresent both in everyday life as well as in the sciences. Epistemologically, there are several systematic ways to build typologies, such as qualitative, theory-based descriptions on one end and quantitative, exploratory statistical means on the other end of the spectrum. Both have their specific advantages and disadvantages, which can be bridged by applying set-theoretic methods, such as Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). The contribution of this paper is substantial and methodological: First, we show how QCA can enhance our understanding of media systems by building a typology that draws on Hallin and Mancini's framework. The main improvement of QCA is the ability to identify ideal types as well as border cases. In our analysis, we move beyond the widely discussed case of Great Britain and take a closer look at further border cases such as Austria, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Portugal. Second, QCA has been scarcely applied to build typologies and if so, only in neighboring disciplines. Thus, we aim at familiarizing comparative political communication scholars with this method.

The threats posed to society by climate change often fail to become priorities for voters and policymakers. Nevertheless, it has been shown that merely paying online attention to climate change can increase the perceived severity of the associated risks and thus encourage climate action. Therefore, we focus on public discourse on Twitter to explore the interplay of "triggers" and discursive features that stimulate attention to climate change. We collected data from 2017 to 2021, identified each year's top five "peak" events of climate attention, and applied manual content (N = 2,500) and automated network analyses (N = ~17,000,000). The results show that while specific events and actors may not trigger and maintain attention permanently, there are discursive features (types of domains, discourses, users, and networks) that continuously shape attention to climate change. Debates are highly politicized and often call for action, criticize administrations, stress negative future scenarios, and controversially debate over the reality of climate change. Attention thereby is amplified within hybrid discourses which merge different triggers, being dominated by political, cultural, and journalistic media accounts: Political events trigger posts that stress the reality of climate change, whereas tweets on protests and cultural events are amplified if they call for action. However, antagonism and backlashes to such posts are essential features of the peaks investigated. Accordingly, attention is often connected to controversial debates regarding focusing events, polarizing figures (such as Greta Thunberg or Donald Trump), and the formation of counter-public networks. Which content is amplified highly depends on the subnetworks that users are situated in.

This study aimed to validate and extend Hallin and Mancini's framework of comparison to discriminate empirical types of media systems in Central and Eastern Europe. We tested and complemented their original dimensions by using aggregated data from 11 countries (Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia). Our study shows the strength of political parallelism and public service broadcasting as variables for comparison. It also found that press freedom and foreign ownership point to significant differences between media systems in the region. Finally, a cluster analysis revealed the existence of three groups of media systems and provides empirical support for the assertion that there is no unique type of East-Central European media system.