Process skeptical populist framing of climate change in right-leaning media

ABSTRACT

Scholars have noted the compatibility of right-wing populism—centering on belief in an antagonistic relationship between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ – with climate change skepticism. In this paper, we examine process skepticism, a type of criticism that we argue is especially well-aligned with populism. Process skepticism focuses not on denying evidence of climate change (evidence skepticism) nor on critiquing policy responses (response skepticism), but on directly attacking the scientific and political processes underlying climate science and policy decision-making. We examine the prevalence of populist ideas in climate skeptical frames disseminated in U.S. media between 2008 and 2020. As expected, we find robust evidence of populist skepticism, particularly in far-right outlets. More importantly, the majority of populist messages were process skeptical in nature. The emergence of process skeptical populist frames may critically impede climate policy efforts by promoting distrust that is especially resistant to increasing scientific evidence or policy advancements.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change skepticism
• process skepticism
• right-wing populism
• framing
• U.S. media

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. For the exploratory comparison case, we analyzed editorials and op-eds from the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times. We collected the first 50 articles of each via ProQuest Newstream resulting in a sample of 1,517 individual paragraphs. As expected, the vast majority of paragraphs (96%) from these sources did not contain any form of climate skepticism, so the final combined sample of skeptic paragraphs from the four left-leaning sources was 57.

2. The decisions to treat paragraphs as individual and mutually exclusive units of analysis are consistent with recommendations by Gilardi et al. (2021). They note, first, that paragraphs are the basic structuring element of news articles. As such, identifying a single core theme per paragraph prevents false equivalences between the primary use of one frame with a brief mention of another (e.g. a paragraph that largely focuses on the inefficacy of a climate policy but also fleetingly alludes to scientific uncertainty). Second, the decision to treat each paragraph as independent allows for better comparisons between sources where the length of the articles/transcripts varies significantly.

3. The primary coding was completed by an expert coder. To examine whether the expert coding produced consistent and reliable results, a second coder naïve to study hypotheses was trained to analyze a random sample of 20% of the articles. The second coder recovered a high proportion of the same constructs across both coding dimensions: populism (Krippendorff’s alpha = .78) and skepticism type (Krippendorff’s alpha = .85).