Projects in development

Horizon Europe Project CAPABLE

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher on the Horizon Europe Project CAPABLE,  a collaborative project of 11 institutions across Europe. The project's objective is to produce methodological and empirical advances in climate policy evaluation by combining insights from different disciplines. I specifically contribute to the project's investigation of political and social dynamics underpinning public acceptability of environmental policy. 

Political Discourse on Climate Change in EU Party Manifestos: A Computational Text Analysis Approach

with Silvia Pianta and Nicolas Schmid

Accepted for presentation at Comptext 2024, What Climate Works Solutions Summit 2024, EPSA 2024, APSA 2024

How do political parties discuss climate change and climate policies in their manifestos? With more ambitious climate action required to achieve global climate mitigation goals, climate change has become increasingly salient in the political arena. However, the literature currently lacks a comprehensive analysis of EU parties’ climate policy positions. In this paper, we build a dataset of climate change salience for most parties active in 27 EU countries from 1990 to 2021. Exploiting recent advances in deep learning architecture, we test and apply a set of multilingual transformers to the corpus of political manifestos made available by the Manifesto Project. With this paper, we make the following contributions: 1) The expansion of the Manifesto Project dataset to include specific climate change variables for EU countries; 2) The implementation of an efficient and replicable pipeline for multilingual and multiclass text classification for political discourse based on recent developments of deep learning architecture. Our dataset can be employed to investigate party dynamics, allowing further contributions to the literature on party competition and party responsiveness. 


Climate Communication amidst Technopolitical Change: Challenges, Transformations, and New Directions for Climate Communication Research

with various members of the Climate Social Science Network (Rachel Wetts, Hanna E. Morris, Maxwell Boykoff, Brenda McNally, James Painter,  Emily P. Diamond, Marc Esteve del Valle, Loredana Loy, Kelly E. Perry, Urooj Raja, and Robin Tschötschel)

Here, we seek to provide a meta-level view of the interdisciplinary field of climate media and communication, taking stock of the field’s achievements, challenges, and where we should direct our efforts moving forward. While the field has generated important insights to guide research and practice, recent empirical developments challenge the traditional structure of the field. The field has developed a tripartite structure where scholars tend to focus on one of three distinct phases of the communication process: (1) the production of narratives, frames, images, and other forms of communication about climate; (2) the dissemination of these communications in media industries and institutions; and (3) their reception by policymakers, partisans, and publics. However, recent developments in climate media and communication—including the increasing importance of social media and AI, new forms of climate obstruction, and disengagement and fatigue in an era of intersecting political, economic, and environmental crises—have made these traditional lines of demarcation increasingly unworkable. While the lines of demarcation between production, dissemination, and reception are increasingly blurred in important new empirical phenomena, they have remained in scholarly communities and research questions, impeding research progress. After describing and analyzing this structural challenge to the field, we conclude with promising directions for new research that could help the field overcome these difficulties, rise to the challenges posed by recent social transformations, and provide practitioners with actionable research to inform their efforts in the years to come.


Divergences between mainstream and social media discourses after COP26, and why they matter 

With James Painter

Accepted for presentation at ICA 2024.

UN climate conferences referred to as COPs (Conference of the Parties) have become major prompts for scholarship on how mainstream and social media construct, shape and promote a range of discourses about climate change. However, previous research has not sought to compare responses to COPs in the two arenas. Here we compare reactions to the 2021 Glasgow climate conference (COP26) as presented by articles in five top English-language online newspapers in four countries (Australia, India, the UK and the US) with those of prominent users and organisations on Facebook and Instagram. We find strong topical and sentiment divergences between the two arenas. In particular, mainstream media focus predominantly on the (minor) progress made at the conference, the coal deal, and the ‘interference’ from India and China to water it down. In contrast, social media posts are more negative in sentiment and focus on the general failure of the conference and world leaders. In doing so, the social media discourse casts doubt on the ability of COP conferences to take sufficient action on climate issues. The disconnect raises important questions about the role of each platform in public discourse on climate change, the perceived legitimacy of global political action, and the impact of changing user demographics and preferences on public responses to climate issues.

More 'nascent' projets:

If you would like to learn more about these ideas, or potentially collaborate on them, please get in touch!