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ABSTRACT Is climate change discourse highly politicized and divisive, or has the debate instead become “post-political,” oriented around consensus, problem-solving and administrative management? Adjudicating this debate is important for pragmatic and theoretical reasons. Pragmatically, these divergent characterizations suggest different barriers climate discourse might pose for engaging public concern and citizen mobilization. Theoretically, these characterizations provide different understandings of how elites respond to structural crisis. Using automated text analysis to describe a large corpus of organizations’ press releases about climate change from 1985 to 2013 (N = 1,768), I find that this discourse has been largely expert-oriented and technocratic, neglecting concerns of values and identity widely believed to be important for social movement mobilization. Organizations predominantly frame climate change as a problem that, while real and serious, is best handled through the careful and deliberate work of scientific, political, and economic elites. Surprisingly, these observations remain true even among advocacy organizations. These findings provide empirical support that a “post-political” framing of climate change, where the issue is discussed in a way that neutralizes social and political power dynamics, dominates American organizations’ official pronouncements about climate change. To the extent that earlier scholars are correct that conflict-oriented discursive strategies—such as identification of a common antagonist—are effective at rousing public concern, this discourse is unlikely to mobilize strong public emotion and activism.

Whose voices are most likely to receive news coverage in the US debate about climate change? Elite cues embedded in mainstream media can influence public opinion on climate change, so it is important to understand whose perspectives are most likely to be represented. Here, I use plagiarism-detection software to analyze the media coverage of a large random sample of business, government, and social advocacy organizations’ press releases about climate change (n = 1,768), examining which messages are cited in all articles published about climate change in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today from 1985 to 2014 (n = 34,948). I find that press releases opposing action to address climate change are about twice as likely to be cited in national newspapers as are press releases advocating for climate action. In addition, messages from business coalitions and very large businesses are more likely than those from other types of organizations to receive coverage. Surprisingly, press releases from organizations providing scientific and technical services are less likely to receive news coverage than are other press releases in my sample, suggesting that messages from organizations with greater scientific expertise receive less media attention. These findings support previous scholars’ claims that journalistic norms of balance and objectivity have distorted the public debate around climate change, while providing evidence that the structural power of business interests lends them heightened visibility in policy debates.

Do appeals that subtly invoke negative racial stereotypes shift whites’ political attitudes by harnessing their racial prejudice? Though widely cited in academic and popular discourse, prior work finds conflicting evidence for this “dog-whistle hypothesis.” Here we test the hypothesis in two experiments (total N = 1,797) in which white Americans’ racial attitudes were measured two weeks before they read political messages in which references to racial stereotypes were implicit, explicit, or not present at all. Our findings suggest that implicit racial appeals can harness racial resentment to influence policy views, though specifically among racially resentful white liberals. That dog-whistle effects would be concentrated among liberals was not predicted in advance, but this finding appears across two experiments testing effects of racial appeals in policy domains—welfare and gun control—that differ in the extent and ways they have been previously racialized. We also find evidence that the same group occasionally responded to explicit racial appeals even though these appeals were recognized as racially insensitive. We conclude by discussing implications for contemporary American politics, presenting representative survey data showing that racially resentful, white liberals were particularly likely to switch from voting for Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016.

Recent scholarship suggests that groups who oppose acting on climate change have shifted their emphasis from attacking the credibility of climate science itself to questioning the policies intended to address it, a position often called ‘response skepticism’. As television is the platform most used by audiences around the world to receive climate information, we examine 30 news programmes on 20 channels in Australia, Brazil, Sweden, the UK and USA which included coverage of the 2021 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the Physical Science. Using manual quantitative content analysis, we find that skepticism about the science of climate change is still prevalent in channels that we have classified as ‘right-wing’, but largely absent from channels classified as ‘mainstream’. Forms of response skepticism are particularly common in ‘right-wing’ channels, but also present in some ‘mainstream’ coverage. Two of the most prominent discourses question the perceived economic costs of taking action and the personal sacrifices involved. We explore the implications of our findings for future research and climate communication.

Here, we integrate prior work to develop and test a theory of how perceived macro-level trends in racial standing shape whites’ views of welfare policy. We argue that when whites perceive threats to their relative advantage in the racial status hierarchy, their resentment of minorities increases. This increased resentment in turn leads whites to withdraw support for welfare programs when they perceive these programs to primarily benefit minorities. Analysis of American National Election Studies data and two survey-embedded experiments support this reasoning. In Study 1, we find that whites’ racial resentment increased beginning in 2008, the year of Barack Obama’s successful presidential candidacy and a major economic downturn, the latter a factor previously shown to amplify racial threat effects. At the same time, whites’ opposition to welfare increased relative to minorities’. In Study 2, we sought to better establish the causal effect of racial status threats. We found that experimentally presenting information suggesting that the white majority is rapidly declining increased whites’ opposition to welfare, and this effect was mediated by heightened racial resentment. Finally, in Study 3 we found that threatening whites’ sense of their economic advantage over minorities led whites to report greater opposition to welfare programs, but only if these programs were portrayed as primarily benefiting minorities, not if they were portrayed as benefiting whites. These findings suggest that whites’ perceptions that minorities’ standing is rising can produce periods of “welfare backlash” in which adoption of policies restricting or curtailing welfare programs is more likely.

In April 2022 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its report on the mitigation of climate change, which included detailed discussion of the wide range of solutions at the personal, societal and governmental level needed to reduce emissions. The report generated extensive societal debate and interest in mainstream and social media. Using manual text analysis, we examined 66 articles on more than 20 popular English-language online news sites in the UK and USA and the 56 most shared posts or tweets on Facebook and Twitter about the report. First, we found that the mainstream media faithfully reported the IPCC’s priority messages, and often included the IPCC’s own critique of some solutions, such as Carbon Dioxide Removal, as compared to critiques from other sources. The coverage represented a sharp break with the historical tradition of focusing on the negative, disaster-focused impacts of climate change in favor of more positive, solutions-based reporting. Secondly, in sharp contrast, many of the most widely-shared social media posts did not closely follow the IPCC’s main messages. Less than a quarter of the posts contained the summary message of the report, and about half mentioned no solutions at all. Instead they focused on the direness of the situation and the urgency with which action needs to be taken. Finally, there was a very low presence of voices from the organized climate countermovement, who often question the need to take far-reaching and rapid mitigation action. We discuss the significance of our results for future research and for practical action.

In this dissertation, I examine how American organizations have framed the issue of climate change, and how cultural and organizational processes affect which conceptions of climate change become dominant in mainstream media. First, I use a variety of automated text analysis procedures (topic modeling, multi-dimensional scaling, and cluster analysis) to describe a large, random sample of business, government, and social advocacy organizations’ press releases about climate change from 1985 to 2013 (N = 1,768). Next, I use plagiarism-detection software to track how organizations’ messages have been picked up in all articles about climate change published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today from 1985 to 2014 (total N = 34,948). These techniques allow me to describe organizations’ framing attempts and then to investigate why some succeed and diffuse into the larger discursive environment and others do not, highlighting organizational power and cultural resonance as two distinct paths through which organizations’ messages gain visibility.The dissertation is organized around three empirical chapters. In the first empirical chapter, I describe how American organizations have framed the issue of climate change over the course of the climate change debate. Across a range of organizations with different motivations and strategies, one would expect very different framings, particularly from corporations seeking to oppose action on climate change as compared to advocacy organizations trying to affect those changes. Instead, I find that a single, “post-political” frame of climate change dominates discourse. This framing is expert-oriented and technocratic, casting consensual action among economic and political elites as the appropriate way to address the climate problem, and neglecting concerns of values and identity widely believed to be important for social movement mobilization. This suggests that both businesses and civil society organizations have responded to mounting evidence of climate change by proposing methods to address environmental degradation that reinforce rather than challenge the economic and political status quo. In addition, to the extent that earlier scholars are correct that conflict-oriented discursive strategies—such as identification of a common antagonist—are effective at rousing public concern, this suggests that climate discourse is unlikely to mobilize strong public emotion and activism.The second empirical chapter examines how organizations’ characteristics affect their ability to influence wider discourse. I find that advocates against action to address climate change are about twice as likely to be cited in national newspapers as are advocates for climate action. In addition, business coalitions and very large businesses are more likely than other types of organizations to receive coverage, either because these firms are seen as important players in the national economy or because these organizations have more human resources to expend promoting their messages. Surprisingly, scientific and technical organizations are less likely to receive news coverage than are other organizations, suggesting that organizations with presumably greater expertise to speak to the scientific issues around climate change are afforded less media attention. My findings therefore suggest that climate discourse may contribute to the problem of stalled action to address climate change on two fronts: organizations primarily advocate for action to address climate change in ways that are unlikely to mobilize a public response, while the relatively small number of organizations that advocate against any action whatsoever receive heightened visibility in the public sphere.Finally, in the third empirical chapter, I examine how broad-based cultural narratives and the interventions of powerful organizations have each influenced the American climate change debate. I code press releases according to whether they would be expected to (a) resonate with latent American cultural narratives, (b) appeal to audiences’ values, emotions, and identities, or (c) speak to audiences’ topical concerns, allowing me to perform a rare deductive test of whether cultural resonance influences whether organizations’ framings of climate change receive coverage in mainstream media. My results suggest that climate change messages that appeal to audiences’ values, emotions, and identities receive heightened media visibility, as do messages that appeal to audiences’ topical concerns for economic well-being during periods of economic downturn. In addition, appeals that accord with American cultural models of rational, market-based behavior receive more news coverage than those which do not. At the same time, business coalitions and very large businesses are more likely than other types of organizations to receive news coverage, consistent with the claim that the structural power of business interests leads their perspectives to receive disproportionate visibility. Together, these results suggest that the public debate around climate change is shaped by both the cultural meanings of climate messages and the power relationships of the organizations that promote them.

Since its rapid rise in early 2009, scholars have advanced a variety of explanations for popular support for the Tea Party movement. Here we argue that various political, economic, and demographic trends and events--e.g., the election of the first nonwhite president, the rising minority population--have been perceived as threatening the relative standing of whites in the U.S., with the resulting racial resentment fueling popular support for the movement. This \"decline of whiteness\" explanation for white Americans' Tea Party support differs from prior accounts in highlighting the role of symbolic group status rather than personal experience, or economic competition, with minority group members in generating perceptions of threat. We tested this explanation in five survey-based experiments. In Study 1 we sought to make salient the president's African-American heritage by presenting participants with an artificially darkened picture of Barack Obama. White participants shown the darkened photo were more likely to report they supported the Tea Party relative to a control condition. Presenting participants with information that the white population share (Study 2) or income advantage (Study 3) is declining also led whites to report greater Tea Party support, effects that were partly explained by heightened levels of racial resentment. A fourth study replicated the effects of Study 2 in a sample of Tea Party supporters. Finally, Study 5 showed that threatened white respondents reported stronger support for the Tea Party when racialized aspects of its platform (e.g., opposition to immigration) were highlighted, than if libertarian ones (e.g., reduced government spending) were. These findings are consistent with a view of popular support for the Tea Party as resulting, in part, from threats to the status of whites in America.