Air pollution in Northeast Asia: can framing of public messages influence beliefs and attributions?

ABSTRACT

Public support for any policy is often influenced by communications highlighting aspects of it – such as a policy’s perceived “costs” or “benefits” to people. This paper tests for these attitudinal differences as they relate to the transboundary air pollution problem in South Korea where cross-national coordination efforts among China, South Korea, and Japan have done little to alleviate the problem. We conduct an emphasis framing experiment launched in mid-2019, testing whether the importance of cooperation with China decreases or increases with exposure to different frames, such as Korea working alone to address the problem or Korea and China working together. While the message frames utilised in our study did not show a powerful direct impact on respondents, a secondary analysis reveals differences across pre-existing beliefs and attitudes. For Korean policy makers to effectively respond to both domestic and foreign demands related to the air pollution problem in Northeast Asia, there must be acknowledgement of this variance throughout the policy making process. This study thus highlights a tension for policy makers: trying to shift public beliefs through specific messages or allowing change in policy design by engaging the public in a more bottom-up deliberative approach.

KEYWORDS:

• Northeast Asia
• Korea
• air pollution
• international coordination
• framing effects

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. These include the Northeast Asia Conference on Environmental Cooperation, the Northeast Asia Subregional Program for Environmental Cooperation, the Northeast Asia Clean Air Partnership, the East Asian Acid Rain Monitoring Network, and the Tripartite Environmental Ministers Meeting.

2. Perceptions about the air pollution problem can diverge from real air pollution measures but, in some places, such as China, political institutions can mitigate these differences (Peng et al., 2019).

3. For more details on the connections between political sophistication and attribution of blame, see Gomez and Wilson (2007). For an example of how science literacy impacts perceptions of climate change, which is a topic paralleling Northeast Asian transboundary air pollution, see Kahan et al. (2012). It should be noted that, regarding science literacy, air pollution-related knowledge among Koreans decreases satisfaction with the policy-related decisions of both Korea and China (Shapiro & Bolsen, 2018).

4. See the Appendix A for complete details regarding the wording of this question.

5. Some argue that the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate arose from the Northeast Asian countries given the lack of the U.S.’s commitment to the Kyoto Protocol (Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen & Van Asselt, 2009). In addition to the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, the Northeast Asian Subregional Program for Environmental Cooperation also focuses on technological coordination across Northeast Asia.

6. Management of the panel is conducted by randomly sent invitations for participation in Internet surveys with monetary incentives for participation. The estimated monetary incentive for respondents participating in the experiment was approximately $5. Selection bias from targeting only Internet users is alleviated given the nearly 95.9% Internet penetration rate in Korea. This Internet penetration rate is based on 2018 data, according to the CIA World Factbook (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/204.html).

7. Two-sample t-tests confirmed that the differences among the four conditions were not statistically significant.

8. See the Appendix A for complete details regarding the wording of these questions used to collect these measures.

9. Pairwise correlation analysis confirms that multicollinearity among these explanatory variables is of no concern.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthew A. Shapiro

Matthew A. Shapiro is a professor of political science at the Illinois Institute of Technology, a research affiliate at Argonne National Laboratory’s Joint Center for Energy Storage Research, and he has held research fellowships and appointments at the East Asia Institute and the Asiatic Research Institute. Complete details can be found at understandgreen.com.

Toby Bolsen

Toby Bolsen is a Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University. His research focuses on the study of political communication, preference formation, political behavior, and U.S. energy and climate policy.

Yungwook Kim

Yungwook Kim (PhD, University of Florida, 1999) is a professor of communication and media at Ewha Womans University, Seoul. His current research focuses on the roles of communication and sociocultural perspectives in the context of science, health, environment, and risk (SHER) issues.