Climate change communication from cities in the USA

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer Verlag via the DOI in this record.Cities in the USA engage in action on climate change, even as the federal government remains resistant to comprehensive climate policy. While experts generally agree that local level adaptation and mitigation policies are critical to avoiding the worst climate impacts, the degree to which cities communicate climate change issues to their constituents has yet to be fully explored. In this article, we evaluate how US cities communicate climate change-related issues, problems, and policies. We use a computer-assisted approach to evaluate climate change efforts by cities by examining the full text of press releases of 82 large cities in the USA. We first identify who discusses climate change, finding that many large cities in the USA address climate change in their public communication. Second, we examine the content of these discussions. Many cities discuss weather-related concerns in conjunction with broad collaborative efforts to address global warming, while city-based policy discussions focus more on energy and transportation efforts. Third, we evaluate the local factors associated with these discussions. We find that the city’s climate vulnerability is particularly influential in shaping the level and timing of climatic communication

Political Speech in Religious Sermons

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Cambridge University Press via the DOI in this record.Religious leaders and congregants alike report high levels of political discussions in their churches. Yet, few opportunities emerge to directly observe political discussions in a wide set of religious settings. We examine the nature of these political discussions with a novel dataset of over 110,000 sermons. Using a computational text analysis approach and multiple forms of validation, we find political discussions in more than a third of religious sermons and that seven of ten pastors discuss political topics at some point. Common topics include the economy, war, homosexuality, welfare, and abortion. We then use a geographic process to link the sermon data to demographic and political information around the church as well as information about the church and pastor to evaluate variation of political discussion in sermons. We find that most pastors—across location and denomination—discuss most political topics, confirming the intertwined nature of religion and politics in the United States.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC

Measuring and modeling Russian newspaper coverage of climate change

As a significant emitter of greenhouse gases and a country rich in fossil fuels, Russia plays a crucial role in achieving a comprehensive solution to climate-related challenges. Yet, Russia's official position on climate change has varied considerably since the beginning of global negotiations, with the country playing everything from policy leader to laggard. While there are a number factors that shape domestic policy positions, this study offers a comprehensive investigation of newspaper coverage on climate change in Russia. How have Russian newspapers discussed the issue since the Yeltsin era? We approach this question by compiling the largest data set of Russian newspaper coverage to date, which includes 11,131 climate-related articles from 65 papers over a roughly 35 year period. After introducing a “computer assisted” approach to measure the core themes running through climate change coverage, we statistically evaluate the national- and newspaper-level factors associated with how coverage is framed, focusing attention on 23 high circulation papers over the period from 2000 to 2014. We find that national-level predictors—particularly economic conditions—are highly influential in determining whether climate change is covered and how the issue is framed, while paper-level factors such as the presence of an energy interest and ownership structure also have notable effects. Overall, this study offers a rich data set and useful methods to better understand the drivers of climate communication in Russia

Facing the Electorate: Computational Approaches to the Study of Nonverbal Communication and Voter Impression Formation

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this recordPoliticians have strong incentives to use their communication to positively impress and persuade voters. Yet, one important question that persists within the fields of political science, communication, and psychology is whether appearance or substance matters more during political campaigns. To a large extent, this appearance vs. substance question remains open and, crucially, the notion that appearance can in fact effectively sway voter perceptions is consequential for the health of democracy. This study leverages advances from the fields of machine learning and computer vision to expand our knowledge on how nonverbal elements of political communication influence voters immediate impressions of political actors. We rely on video from the 4th Republican Party presidential debate held on 10 November 2016, as well as continuous response approval data from a live focus group (n=311; 36,528 reactions), to determine how the emotional displays of political candidates influence voter impression formation. Our results suggest that anger displays can positively influence viewers’ real-time evaluations. Happiness displays, on the other hand, are much less effective in eliciting a response from the viewing public, while fear displays were extremely rarely projected by the candidates of the debate under studyEconomic and Social Research Council (ESRC

Communicating climate mitigation and adaptation efforts in American cities

This is the final version. Available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.City governments have a large role to play in climate change mitigation and adaptation policies, given that urban locales are responsible for disproportionately high levels of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and are on the “front lines” of observed and anticipated climate change impacts. This study examines how US mayors prioritize climate policies within the context of the city agenda. Employing a computer-assisted content analysis of over 2886 mayoral press releases related to climate change from 82 major American cities for the period 2010–2016, we describe and explain the extent to which city governments discuss mitigation and adaptation policies in official communications. Specifically, we rely on a semi-supervised topic model to measure key climate policy themes in city press releases and examine their correlates using a multilevel statistical model. Our results suggest that while mitigation policies tend to dominate the city agenda on climate policy, discussion of adaptation efforts has risen dramatically in the past few years. Further, our statistical analysis indicates that partisanship influences city discussion on a range of climate policy areas—including emissions, land use policy, and climate resiliency—while projected vulnerability to climatic risks only influences discussion of climate resiliency and adaptation efforts.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC

Computer-assisted classification of contrarian claims about climate change

This is the final version. Available on open access from Nature Research via the DOI in this recordData availability: The analysis data is available at https://socialanalytics.ex.ac.uk/cards/data.zip; The classifiers are available at https://socialanalytics.ex.ac.uk/cards/models.zipCode availability: The analysis code is available at https://github.com/traviscoan/cardsA growing body of scholarship investigates the role of misinformation in shaping the debate on climate change. Our research builds on and extends this literature by 1) developing and validating a comprehensive taxonomy of climate contrarianism, 2) conducting the largest content analysis to date on contrarian claims, 3) developing a computational model to accurately classify specific claims, and 4) drawing on an extensive corpus from conservative think-tank (CTTs) websites and contrarian blogs to construct a detailed history of claims over the past 20 years. Our study finds that the claims utilized by CTTs and contrarian blogs have focused on attacking the integrity of climate science and scientists and, increasingly, has challenged climate policy and renewable energy. We further demonstrate the utility of our approach by exploring the influence of corporate and foundation funding on the production and dissemination of specific contrarian claims.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)Trinity Research in Social Sciences (TRiSS) Research Fellowshi

Gender, Candidate Emotional Expression, and Voter Reactions During Televised Debates

This is the final version. Available on open access from Cambridge University Press via the DOI in this recordData Availability Statement: Data and code to replicate the results in this paper are posted at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/NVVVUV.Voters evaluate politicians not just by what they say, but also how they say it, via facial displays of emotions and vocal pitch. Candidate characteristics can shape how leaders use—and how voters react to—nonverbal cues. Drawing on role congruity expectations, we study how the use of and reactions to facial, vocal, and textual communication in political debates varies by candidate gender. Relying on full-length videos of four German federal election debates (2005–2017) and a minor party debate, we use video, audio, and text data to measure candidate facial displays of emotion, vocal pitch, and speech sentiment. Consistent with our expectations, Angela Merkel expresses less anger than her male opponents, but is just as emotive in other respects. Combining these measures of emotional expression with continuous responses recorded by live audiences, we find that voters punish Merkel for anger displays and reward her happiness and general emotional displays.Trinity College DublinUniversity College DublinTulane Universit

Stranded research? Leading finance journals are silent on climate change

Finance research has shaped the modern financial system, influencing investors and market participants directly through research findings and indirectly through teaching and training programmes. Climate change presents major risks to the global financial system as well as new opportunities for investors. Is climate finance an important topic in finance research? We systematically analyse the content of 20,725 articles published in the leading 21 finance journals between January 1998 and June 2015. We find that only 12 articles (0.06%) are related in some way to climate finance. The three elite finance journals (Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics and Review of Financial Studies) did not publish a single article related to climate finance over the 17.5-year period. We repeat our analysis across a sample of 29 elite business journals spanning accounting, economics, management, marketing and operations research, as well as finance. We find a similar dearth of published climate finance research. We consider four possible explanations for this failure of top finance and business journals to engage with climate finance as a research topic. These include methodological constraints and editorial policies. We conclude by arguing why it is critical for climate-related research to be given greater attention and prominence in finance journals

Addressing vulnerability, building resilience:community-based adaptation to vector-borne diseases in the context of global change

Abstract Background The threat of a rapidly changing planet – of coupled social, environmental and climatic change – pose new conceptual and practical challenges in responding to vector-borne diseases. These include non-linear and uncertain spatial-temporal change dynamics associated with climate, animals, land, water, food, settlement, conflict, ecology and human socio-cultural, economic and political-institutional systems. To date, research efforts have been dominated by disease modeling, which has provided limited practical advice to policymakers and practitioners in developing policies and programmes on the ground. Main body In this paper, we provide an alternative biosocial perspective grounded in social science insights, drawing upon concepts of vulnerability, resilience, participation and community-based adaptation. Our analysis was informed by a realist review (provided in the Additional file 2) focused on seven major climate-sensitive vector-borne diseases: malaria, schistosomiasis, dengue, leishmaniasis, sleeping sickness, chagas disease, and rift valley fever. Here, we situate our analysis of existing community-based interventions within the context of global change processes and the wider social science literature. We identify and discuss best practices and conceptual principles that should guide future community-based efforts to mitigate human vulnerability to vector-borne diseases. We argue that more focused attention and investments are needed in meaningful public participation, appropriate technologies, the strengthening of health systems, sustainable development, wider institutional changes and attention to the social determinants of health, including the drivers of co-infection. Conclusion In order to respond effectively to uncertain future scenarios for vector-borne disease in a changing world, more attention needs to be given to building resilient and equitable systems in the present