Do global climate summits influence public awareness and policy preferences concerning climate change?

ABSTRACT

A survey-embedded experiment implemented around the time of the 2014 annual Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (N ≈ 1200) examined whether such summits are able to increase citizens’ awareness of climate problems. This study finds that exposure to positive or negative cues about the COP increases climate change awareness, particularly among participants who start out with a low level of awareness. Neither positive nor negative cues about the COP significantly affect people’s policy preferences. Our finding resonates with Bernard Cohen’s observation that the mass media may not often be successful in telling people what to think, but they are successful in telling readers what to think about.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• COP
• news
• awareness
• policy preferences
• survey-embedded experiment

Acknowledgements

We thank the editors of Environmental Politics and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, which helped us to improve the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Table 1 in the online appendix offers a comparison between US census socio-demographics and the corresponding distributions in our sample.

2. We set the limit at 20 min because AMT participants usually (as in our study) leave feedback and comments at the end of a survey before they log out of the system and survey time formally ends.

3. Studies employing self-selection of news or news outlets still provide participants with a few options. This is ultimately a ‘controlled’ selection of options (see also Arceneaux and Johnson (2010)).

4. For more on media exposure, refer to Figures 2 and 3 in the online appendix.

5. Refer to the online appendix, Table 3, for survey questions.

6. The purpose of calculating the difference in means is to compare the treatment groups to the control group. Note that the treatment in aggregate level appears larger in comparison to the individual treatment groups of positive (N = 398) and negative (N = 395) news because this group refers to all the participants that have been treated with either positive or negative news (N = 793).

7. See online appendix for an illustration of first differences estimations for changes in Awareness and Policy Preferences (Figures 4 and 5).

8. See online appendix: Figures 6 and 7.

9. Refer to the online appendix in Table 4 for the models’ specifications.

Additional information

Funding

The research for this article was funded by the ERC Advanced Grant ‘Sources of Legitimacy in Global Environmental Governance’ [Grant Number: 295456].