Czech Twitter Climate Debate: Trump’s Announcement of Paris Agreement Withdrawal as an External Event

Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) assumes that external events have the potential to disrupt coalition opportunity structures and redistribute resources within a policy subsystem. Donald Trump’s announcement that the USA withdraw from the Paris Agreement can be considered such external event triggering responses from involved advocacy coalitions. Although social media's importance for policy processes is well-established, there have not been many ACF applications. Against this background, we apply network analysis to Twitter data capturing Czech debate before and after the event to investigate how the event affected (1) activity and (2) interaction patterns of climate protection and climate sceptic camps. After the event, we found that climate protectionist users mobilized and coordinated their activity more than sceptics and, thus, created a more cohesive subgroup structure. The overall coalition structure, however, remained fragmented in both periods. Finally, we reflect on the potential and limits of coalition analysis at the social media level.