A Dynamic Perspective on Publics and Counterpublics: The Role of the Blogosphere in Pushing the Issue of Climate Change During the 2016 US Presidential Campaign

ABSTRACT

Climate change was hardly debated during the 2016 US presidential campaign. Against this background and building upon Fraser's concept of counterpublics (1990), this paper examines whether climate change advocates used the English-speaking blogosphere to push their positions forward. This study uses blog data starting from the Republican nomination of Donald Trump (20 July 2016) to Election Day (8 November 2016) and applies a computerized classification algorithm and topic-modeling techniques to explore, first, the salience of skeptic and advocate positions toward climate change in the English-speaking blogosphere and, second, with which topics these positions are most connected. The results show that the positions and topics of climate change advocates were more salient online than those of climate-change skeptics during the 2016 US presidential campaign. Thus, the study shows that the relation between different publics in societal discourses is not static but may change dynamically over time.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• blogs
• US election 2016
• counterpublic sphere
• automated classification
• topic modeling

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Thomas Häussler http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6949-9135

Notes

1 Posts that mentioned “climate change” or “global warming” at least twice and at least one campaign keyword (hillary, clinton, democratic campaign, democratic nominee, donald, trump, republican campaign, republican nominee, jill stein, gary johnson, presidential campaign, us election, u.s. election, us voting, u.s. voting).

2 n = 698,563 sentences were irrelevant/neutral.