Is there a link between climate change scepticism and populism? An analysis of web tracking and survey data from Europe and the US

ABSTRACT

Climate change and populism are two major phenomena in contemporary politics. Recent successes of populist parties and politicians, especially in Europe and in the US, have given rise to extensive debates in the academic literature and beyond. Yet the link between populism and climate change scepticism (henceforth ‘scepticism’), has so far received little attention. This paper examines the link between scepticism and populism by means of a unique dataset: a survey and detailed web browsing histories of participants from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the US, and the UK. The web tracking data includes more than 150 million website visits over a period of three months and the survey contains questions about political attitudes and attitudes towards climate change. We analyse the 8893 websites which contained ‘climate change’ and its cognates in the URLs and link these website visits and the content of these websites to the political attitudes and climate change orientation of those who visited them. The contribution is both methodological (linking surveys and web tracking data, including cross-country comparison) and substantive (uncovering links between populists, their climate change orientations, and the content of related websites they visited). Our analysis demonstrates the value of computational methods in political communication research and provides insights into the link between populists and climate change scepticism.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• populism
• survey
• web tracking

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Anne Schulz, Mike Schaefer, Richard Fletcher, Caterina Froio and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts.

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 Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval was obtained from the Oxford Internet Institute’s Departmental Research Ethics Committee at the University of Oxford (Reference Number SSH IREC 18 004).

2 In this study, we only use only web tracking data from desktop computers that contains the full URL for each website visit, whereas the smartphone data are more limited.

3 https://www.diffbot.com/products/automatic/#article

4 https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/icecaps/research/media_coverage/world/index.html

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Volkswagen Foundation Grant No. 94758.

Notes on contributors

Pu Yan

Pu Yan is a post-doctoral researcher at Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. She focuses on online information-seeking behaviour, digital divide in China, and the use of social media for everyday life. Her work has combined both traditional social science approaches and computational social science methods.

Ralph Schroeder

Ralph Schroeder is a professor of the Social Science of the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute. His publications include Rethinking Science, Technology and Social Change (Stanford University Press, 2007) and Being There Together: Social Interaction in Virtual Environments (Oxford University Press, 2010). He is also the author of ‘An Age of Limits: Social Theory for the twenty-first Century’ (Palgrave Macmillan 2013) and, with Eric T. Meyer, of ‘Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities’ (MIT Press 2015).

Sebastian Stier

Sebastian Stier is a senior researcher at the Department of Computational Social Science of GESIS—Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Cologne. His research focuses on political communication, comparative politics, populism, and the use of digital trace data and computational methods in the social sciences.