Expanding Skepticism: Populism in Climate Change Discourse

• In Event: Advocacy, Voting, and Mobilization

Abstract

Motivating the political will necessary for fair and ambitious climate change policies is significantly complicated by the rise of populism. Populist rhetoric undermines policy action by motivating distrust in both institutions and politicians. And more recently, right-wing populist discourse has targeted civil servants and intellectuals as conspirators furthering a climate agenda for their own self-interest. This rhetoric aligns with scholarship highlighting the development of different types of climate skepticism—separate from traditional skepticism towards the science of anthropogenic climate change—including skepticism towards the political process and policy responses. Despite this work, and scholarship linking climate attitudes with populism, we currently know less about how populist ideas emerge in this context and become encoded in media discourse. Much of the work on identifying populist frames focuses on party platforms and overt forms of populist rhetoric rather than how these frames disseminate into regular speech and media discourse. I fill this gap by exploring both (1) how to identify and reliably code populist messages encoded in media discourse around climate change and (2) the development and content of populist skeptic frames in relation to other common patterns of climate communication. To do so, I develop a codebook of populist climate frames and complete a content analysis of newspaper opinion pieces and Fox News programing between 2008 and 2020. As right-wing populism plays an increasing role in opposing climate action, this work contributes to our knowledge of both how to identify these populist strategies and their evolution in the context of climate change.

Author

• Janel Jett, Purdue University