A Multidimensional Analysis of Polarisation in the Climate Policy Debate

Climate change and the goal of the Paris Agreement have led to intense pressure for societal change. The measures aimed at reducing climate-damaging gases lead to a change in individual lifestyles. This is in contrast to the future changes in life due to the unrestricted development of climate change. The pressure to change the current lifestyle and the fear of future dangers lead to a potential division and, thus, potential polarization of society. The debate over polarization in the public sphere often concentrates on the opposing of the different opinions or camps. This ignores that the confrontation of opinions and the compromise that follows are an integral part of the democratic process. Even polarization on particular topics does not necessarily lead to social polarization or political impact. Suppose the position on a polarized issue is uniformly distributed over other issues. In that case, no majorities are established within the formation of political opinion, and no camps oppose each other in society. A multi-dimensional analysis is therefore required to analyze the influence of polarization on discourse and the political effects of polarization. In particular, a cross-issue division of society into camps leads to more complex political and social compromises that could make it more challenging to contain climate change. This article, therefore, focuses on two interrelated research questions: a) Is there a polarization in the debate on climate change policy? b) Is polarization within the climate policy debate also found across issues? Sequential data collection serves as the basis for the analysis. The first step is to collect the climate policy debate on Twitter. All tweets on climate policy and their retweets are recorded. The topics of interest from users outside of climate policy were extracted by collecting all other retweets from an account that retweeted a climate policy tweet. The analysis is threefold. First, it examines the polarization inside the climate policy debate. The collected tweets and retweets form a network in which the tweet accounts form the nodes, and the retweets form the edges. Identifying the communities now allows analysis of the different positions. This considers not only the positioning of the different groups but also their isolation and cohesion. The second part is an analysis of the polarization within the cross-issue debate. By identifying the communities, it is possible to determine the positioning of the users across-issue. Finally, a comparison of positioning in both networks is used to investigate cross-issue polarization.