Exploring the dynamics in the environmental discourse: the longitudinal interaction among public opinion, presidential opinion, media coverage, policymaking in 3 decades and an integrated model of media effects (original) (raw)
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Political Research Quarterly, 2009
Agenda theories suggest that problem indicator, focusing event, and information feedback enhance issue attention. However, few studies have systematically tested this. This study, using time series data and vector autoregression (VAR), examines how climate problem indicator, high-profile international event, and climate science feedback influence media and congressional attention to global warming and climate change. The findings confirm that these attention-grabbing factors indeed generally promote issue salience, but these factors may work differently across agenda venues. Attention inertia, interagenda interaction, and partisan advantage on agenda setting are also included and analyzed in the VAR modeling. Implications of the study and recommendations for future research are discussed in conclusion.
This project examined the focus of environmental news frames used in seven American newspapers between 1970 and 2010. During this time newspapers were a primary source of news. Based on gatekeeping and agenda-setting theory, as well as source credibility, the content analysis of 2,123 articles examined the environmental topics within the articles, seven possible risk perception dimensions used in the story, and the primary source of information. The national newspapers typically reported an environmental issue paired with policy; local papers reported a single environmental issue. A Chi-square test found significant differences between national and local newspapers’ use of risk dimensions.
The Forum, 2004
The authors explore the apparent anomaly of strong public support for the environment and popular public support for a president with a poor environmental rating by groups such as the League of Conservation Voters. In attempting to understand why there have not been public outcries against George W. Bush's anti-environmental policies like those that occurred during the Reagan presidency, the authors present three possible explanations: a lag time phenomenon, change in media coverage and ownership, and redefined issue salience.
Development, Environmental Policy, and Mass Media: Theory and Evidence
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
This paper investigates the relationship between development, environmental policy determination, and mass media. It stresses the role of mass media as a channel through which the level of development in ‡uence environmental policy making. Special interests appear to wield considerable in ‡uence over environmental policies, and create policy distortion. We develop a model with two political parties competing in election and policy in ‡uence by special interests to study environmental policy determination. Mass media acts as information provider to voters in the election. It informs voters regarding environmental policy platforms announced by the political parties. The theory suggests that, as development progresses, environmental awareness rises and so does the demand for environmental news. This induces pro…t maximizing media …rm to report more environmental news, and in turn keeps voters better informed regarding the policy platforms of the parties. We …nd that, in equilibrium, a more stringent environmental policy is implemented when the voters are better informed through mass media. The model also demonstrates the way in which process of development brings about the stringency of environmental policy at a level closer to the social optimum when special interests present. Empirical evidence across countries supports our …ndings.
Politics and Governance, 2020
In this article we analyze how media coverage for environmental actors (individual environmental activists and environmental movement organizations) is associated with their perceived policy influence in Canadian climate change policy networks. We conceptualize media coverage as the total number of media mentions an actor received in Canada’s two main national newspapers—the Globe and Mail and National Post. We conceptualize perceived policy influence as the total number of times an actor was nominated by other actors in a policy network as being perceived to be influential in domestic climate change policy making in Canada. Literature from the field of social movements, agenda setting, and policy networks suggests that environmental actors who garner more media coverage should be perceived as more influential in policy networks than actors who garner less coverage. We assess support for this main hypothesis in two ways. First, we analyze how actor attributes (such as the type of actor) are associated with the amount of media coverage an actor receives. Second, we evaluate whether being an environmental actor shapes the association between media coverage and perceived policy influence. We find a negative association between media coverage and perceived policy influence for individual activists, but not for environmental movement organizations. This case raises fundamental theoretical questions about the nature of relations between media and policy spheres, and the efficacy of media for signaling and mobilizing policy influence.
2017
Between 2013 and 2015, I conducted research examining the influence of news media on the process of environmental governance in Kenya. The research combined both statistical and case study approaches to examine the influence that news media brought to bear on environmental governance in the context of the Kenyan jurisdiction. Given the transient nature of news media reporting cycles, the study critically examined snapshots of reported content over timelines during which the occurrences unfolded. The media’s pivotal role in catalyzing public engagement and conveying public information is often treated in literature as a public good because of the media’s role of conveyor of public information and catalyzer of societal engagement on environmental issues. While an issue of environmental importance might be highlighted briefly in a single news cycle, issue resurfacing in latter cycles has ultimately reinforced the messaging to public audiences in a scale sufficient enough to catalyze public engagement generate appropriate policy responses, as was observed in several of the research case studies. In 2016, I further analyzed the data as part of my academic coursework. The process entailed developing a statistical model to examine the influence of news media on public participation and in turn, how public participation influenced the level of stringency in the implementation of environmental policy. The analysis was challenging due to significant gaps in clean and available Kenya-country data on Environmental Policy Stringency. Several data assumptions and adjustments were made, which narrowed down the analysis to a regression of volume of media coverage by thematic area and year. The final output indicated a general upward trend in coverage over the five-year time frame and explained 81.39% of the observed variation in the number of news articles published during the monitoring period. It was however insufficient in analyzing the direct and critical relationship between news media and stringency in environmental policy – which was the initial objective of the paper. Given these gaps, it became essential to re-think the appropriate framework for examining this critical, observed influence. This independent study uses policy process tracing approaches similar to those described by Checkel, also applied by Cashore and Howlett, to examine the agenda setting role of news media.
Since the early 1990s, the American conservative movement has become increasingly hostile toward environmental protection and Congressional Republicans have become increasingly anti-environmental in their voting records. Party sorting theory holds that such political polarization among elites will likely extend to the general public. Analyzing General Social Survey data from 1974 to 2012, we examine whether political polarization has occurred on support for government spending on environmental protection over this time period in the US general public. We find that there has been significant partisan and ideological polarization on support for environmental spending since 1992—consistent with the expectations of party sorting theory. This political polarization on environmental concern in the general public will likely endure save for political convergence on environmental concern among elites in the near future. Such polarization likely will inhibit the further development and implementation of environmental policy and the diffusion of environmentally friendly behaviors.
The great divide: understanding the role of media and other drivers of the partisan divide in public concern over climate change in the USAAbstract Recent scholarship has identified a large and growing divide on how Republicans and Democrats view the issue of climate change. A number of these studies have suggested that this polarization is a product of systematic efforts to spread doubt about the reality of climate change through the media in general and conservative media in particular. However, research to date has largely relied on speculation about such a relationship rather than empirical evidence. We improve on existing research by conducting an empirical analysis of the factors affecting national-level, quarterly shifts in public concern about climate change between January 2001 and December 2014. Our analysis focuses on the potential role played by four factors that should account for changes in levels of concern regarding climate change: (1) media coverage, (2) extreme weather, (3) issuance of major scientific reports, and (4) changes in economic activity and foreign conflict. Some results suggest that partisan media influences beliefs in ways expected by communication scholars who describe Becho chamber^effects and Bboomerang^effects. Among other supporting evidence, we find that partisan media not only strengthen views of like-minded audiences but also when Republicans are presented with opposing frames about climate change from liberal media, they appear to reject the messages such that they are less concerned about the issue. Findings also demonstrate that the dissemination of science increases concern about climate change among Democrats but has no influence on Republicans. Finally, extreme weather does not increase concern among Democrats or Republicans. Implications for future research are discussed.