Politicization of Climate Change in Online Media: a Comparative Analysis of Nine Countries Using Distributional Semantics

Previous research in political science suggests that media has a significant impact on how climate change is framed as political issue in different national contexts. The research spans qualitative case studies on specific national news outlets and quantitative studies of cross-country comparisons. This paper contributes to the contemporary debate on media and climate change using the online distributional semantic lexicon developed within the research project ‘Linguistic Explorations of Societies’ (LES) to explore how climate change is framed in nine countries (Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Morocco, Russia, Sweden, United States) between 2015-2020. The data collected from online editorial and social media data enables us to analyze the different meanings of the term climate in normal, unsolicited and contemporary language use and to develop an analytical framework to capture how politicization of climate change plays out across national contexts. Our main contributions are two: (i) we show that the media discourse on climate is closely related to the environment, to governance, to ideology, and to geopolitics; and (ii) our analysis indicates that the media discourse differs considerably between national contexts. In a comparative perspective, climate as geopolitics is, for instance, clearly prevalent in China, Russia and the US, climate as ideology is most prominent in France, Morocco and the US, while climate is closely related to governance in Sweden, and climate as directly related to the environment is only dominating in the media discourse in Germany. These findings are highly relevant for current discussions in political science and related disciplines on the increasing geo-politicization of global climate governance since they show that national news and social media in China and Russia were emphasizing geopolitics and climate change already in the period right after the signing of the Paris agreement and before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the re-election of Donald Trump as US President. In addition, the different meanings of the term climate across language and cultural contexts also cast doubts on the potential of deliberative democratic procedures on an international level, for instance, the use of deliberative mini-publics in climate policy-making.