Patterns of polarization: Transnational dynamics in climate change online networks in the US and Switzerland

Abstract

Research into hyperlink interaction patterns has been particularly interested in whether they integrate the online space or segregate it into “echo chambers.” Concentrating on contentious politics in national settings, the existing studies have mainly examined the relationships between domestic actors, mostly bloggers. This study seeks to expand the focus by including several actor types, allowing their connective actions to reach beyond national borders, and employing a comparative approach that contrasts high- with low-contentious contexts. Analyzing climate change hyperlink networks originating in the US and Switzerland, the results show that their transnational dimension plays a crucial role in polarizing the discourse, regardless of the specific political context. We find similar patterns that segregate climate advocates from skeptics and lead to distinct transnational relationships within the camps. The results demonstrate that countermovement actors in particular are able to forge strong transnational alliances.

Keywords:

• Climate change
• contentiousness
• hyperlinks
• polarization
• social network analysis
• transnationality

Notes

1 Alternative scenarios are conceivable, where issues are contentious but there is a broad basic consensus on which the parties in the debate agree, or where low contentiousness goes hand in hand with many different opinions. Whereas the latter might be encountered in settings where concerns, issues, grievances, etc. have not yet been successfully politicized, the former points to forms of disagreement that are located on the pragmatic level of normative conflict (Habermas 1996), which runs less deep and is more concerned with how to implement specific policy aspects practically than with debates on the ethical-political (e.g., immigration) or moral (e.g., abortion) levels.

2 A list of the keywords used in German and English and the seed web pages can be found in the Appendix in the supplementary file (https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2019.1614707). We limited the seeds of the Swiss network to the German-speaking area.

3 Even with the restrictive specification of one hyperlink step, only around 40% of the actors in the network addressed climate change. The figure dropped below 15% if the boundary of the crawl was further expanded.

4 We examined a sample of the web pages without matching keywords to ensure that the indexing procedure did not omit content related to the issue.

5 The actor attributes were coded by two trained coders. The inter-rater reliability was calculated using a master template and is based on 150 coded units for each variable (Krippendorff 2012). The mean reliability coefficients of 0.898 (actor type), 0.927 (country), and 0.891 (actor position) were calculated using Krippendorff’s alpha and are deemed satisfactory.

6 Note that the models include only those parameters that lead to convergence of the estimation process and increase the goodness of fit. Exogenous terms not included are, for instance, the language of the actors, as it is collinear with the country attribute.

7 The ERGMs were fitted using the “statnet” package for the statistical software R. The goodness of fit statistics for all models are acceptable, although the fit is generally better for the smaller Swiss network (see Appendix in the supplementary file– URL on bottom of first page). The statistics were calculated after fitting different models—over 40 in the US case—and choosing the best fitting one (for a similar approach, see Hunter, Goodreau, and Handcock 2008).