Global Climate Change or National Climate Changes? An Analysis of the Performance of Online Issue Publics in Integrating Global Issues

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes how the complex global spatiality of climate change is integrated into online national public discourses. Although the Web is an important venue for public discourses, little is known about its capability to integrate transnational issues. By looking at two types of communicative links (hyperlinks and referential links), we assess the degree and the scope of transnational integration for the four cases of Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The findings show that these national discourses are heavily transnationalized. However, the scope of transnationalization is restricted to countries of the Global North, with a clear focus on the United States. This leads to the conclusion that the Web’s capability to integrate transnational issues is limited.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• public discourse
• online
• Web
• transnationalization
• comparative research
• hyperlinks
• referential links
• automated content analysis

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 At the time of data collection.

2 We asked researchers investigating climate change discourse and policy in the four countries to validate and, if necessary, modify the lists of actors obtained by literature reviews and Google searches.

3 The English terms “climate change” and “global warming,” as well as the corresponding German terms “Klimawandel” and “Globale Erwärmung,” were used as search terms. These are often used and identified as appropriate search terms to capture the issue of climate change (Painter & Gavin, 2016; Shapiro & Park, 2015).

4 The coding was done by two trained student assistants. The training process consisted of several rounds of coding an identical set of actors, followed by a comparison with the master coding and a discussion of the results. The intercoder reliability was assessed by comparing the coders’ classification with the master coding. We used Krippendorff’s alpha to measure the agreement between the coders’ classification and the master coding as the coefficient is comparable across any number of coders, values, metrics, and sample sizes. For the scope variable (distinguishing 199 categories), Krippendorff’s alpha was 0.93 and therefore satisfactory (1 means complete agreement). Throughout data collection, critical cases were discussed and coded in coders’ meetings.

5 A total of 12 for Switzerland and the UK and, due to technical issues in the network gathering process, 11 for Germany and the US.

6 The same search terms as for the webpages were used to index the newspaper articles and political documents.

7 The coding was done by seven trained coders. As for the networks, the intercoder reliability was assessed by comparing the coders’ classification with a master coding. For the scope variable (distinguishing 199 categories), Krippendorff’s alpha was 0.82 and thus acceptable.

Additional information

Funding

This publication was created in the context of the Research Unit “Political Communication in the Online World” (FOR 1381), Subproject 07, which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG, project number 155794648). The subproject is also funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF, project number 100017E-154100).