From Weather to Words – The Effect of Extreme Weather on Political Elite Communication

How does exposure to abnormal and extreme weather affect the political behavior of political elites? While previous studies suggest that weather exposure affects climate attitudes among the public, little is known about how political elites react to such events. We address this gap by investigating how individual party politicians adjust their attention to climate change issues in their communication in response to weather exposure. We argue that candidates have an incentive to strategically address the issue of climate change following abnormal and extreme weather in their constituency, as these events are locally confined and can heighten the salience of climate change for voters. Social media platforms are crucial in this context, allowing politicians to react in real-time and bypass the delays typical of traditional press releases. Our analysis builds on over 250.000 tweets from more than 550 candidates or MPs of the German Bundestag throughout 2021 and follows three steps: First, we use a finetuned state-of-the-art large language model (XLM-RoBERTa) to filter climate change-related statements. Then we employ a novel stepwise zero-shot classification approach using GPT4 models guided by a custom codebook to identify mentions of actions to address climate change and their sentiment. Finally, we link these Twitter data with geo-referenced weather data. Thus, we can show whether candidates have strategically exploited weather events to advance their (anti-)environmental agenda.