Zoom (Talk)
Virtual Talk with James Hollway
Abstract
How urgent is climate change for our leaders and where does it lie in their list of priorities? When speaking to their electorates and canvassing support, politicians employ various terms to signal the urgency of different problems and the priority of specific policies. We introduce a new text analytic tool, urgency analysis, to capture the expressed urgency of political priorities. Urgency analysis combines natural language processing and survey validated dictionaries to provide an interpretable measure of the urgency of priorities in political texts. This allows us to compare the urgency of climate change priorities by speaker and over time. To demonstrate what urgency analysis offers compared to other text analytical methods, we use data on US presidential and UK prime ministerial political speeches on climate change between 2007 and 2020. We find that, even as average temperatures rise, climate change is framed no more urgently than before. It does appear more urgent in UK discourse though, and for some leaders more than others. We conclude by discussing extensions to urgency analysis and the potential it has to answer different questions across more contexts.
Bio
James Hollway is Co-Director of the Global Governance Centre, Head of the Environment and Sustainability Specialisation, and Associate Professor of International Relations/Political Science at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. His research develops multilevel and dynamic network theories, methods, and data for studying institutionalised cooperation and conflict on trade, health, and environmental issues over time. His work has been published with Cambridge University Press, Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Studies Quarterly, Global Environmental Politics, International Environmental Agreements, Policy Studies Journal, Sociological Theory, Sociological Methodology, Social Networks, and Network Science. You can find more information at jameshollway.com.
Zoom Registration
The Talk will take place on Wednesday, November 13th, 12:00 CEST.
Please register with office@c3s.uni-frankfurt.de to receive the Zoom login.