Politicized or Neglected? The Role of Scientific Knowledge in Parliamentary Debates

Our understanding of science is not just shaped by scientific institutions themselves but is also constructed by how scientific institutions and scientific knowledge are publicly and politically discussed (Scheufele, 2014). Furthermore, scientific evidence has become an essential aspect of how political parties communicate and debate, especially in times of crisis. As a result, some scholars have argued that science can be seen as increasingly politicized in different ways (Kreps & Kriner, 2020). For instance, political debates on the climate crisis often utilize evidence-based knowledge, yet diverse interpretations, often aligned with partisan perspectives (Willis, 2017), raise questions about the interpretation of such knowledge and how to deal with the certainty or uncertainty of scientific facts (Oreskes, 2015). In this study, we show how scientific knowledge is framed by politicians in parliamentary debates. We explore various strategies, including employing populist frames when discussing science (Mede & Schäfer, 2020), using technocratic frames to disguise unpopular policy choices as inevitable (Kettell & Kerr, 2022), and the degree to which politicians follow scientific evidence in parliamentary debates and make evidence-based policy decisions. Differences between parties are expected due to different political positions, issue ownership, and general positions towards empirical evidence. We collected an extensive corpus of roughly 200.000 publicly available speech protocols from two decades of parliamentary debates in Austria - a pertinent case where science is vigorously discussed, science-skeptic attitudes prevail, and a (science) populist party is represented in the parliament (Eberl et al., 2021). By employing supervised automated text analysis methods, we identify relevant sequences in parliamentary speeches utilizing scientific knowledge. These sequences are further investigated using topic modeling to identify relevant patterns and strategies. The results will deliver a better understanding of how and to what degree science is politicized in the policy-making process by different parties and whether there are changes over time. References: Eberl, J.-M., Huber, R. A., & Greussing, E. (2021). From populism to the "plandemic": Why populists believe in COVID-19 conspiracies. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, 31(sup1), 272–284. https://doi.org/10.1080/17457289.2021.1924730 Kettell, S., & Kerr, P. (2022). ‘Guided by the science’: (De)politicising the UK government’s response to the coronavirus crisis. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 24(1), 11–30. https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481211054957 Kreps, S. E., & Kriner, D. L. (2020). Model uncertainty, political contestation, and public trust in science: Evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic. Science Advances, 6(43), eabd4563. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abd4563 Mede, N. G., & Schäfer, M. S. (2020). Science-related populism: Conceptualizing populist demands toward science. Public Understanding of Science, 29(5), 473–491. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662520924259 Oreskes, N. (2015). The fact of uncertainty, the uncertainty of facts and the cultural resonance of doubt. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 373(2055), 20140455. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2014.0455 Scheufele, D. A. (2014). Science communication as political communication. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(supplement_4), 13585–13592. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1317516111 Willis, R. (2017). Taming the Climate? Corpus analysis of politicians’ speech on climate change. Environmental Politics, 26(2), 212–231. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2016.1274504