Impact of Political Views on Individual Responsibility Perceived Concerning Climate Change

Outline

Abstract

1. Climate crises and political news: an introduction

2. How does political news consumption influence the individual responsibility to climate change? Theory and hypothesis

3. An empirical analysis on the relationship between political news consumption and the individual responsibility to climate change
3.1. Description of the data
3.2 Operationalisation
3.3. Method
3.4. Descriptive analysis
3.5. Analysis of the results

4. To what extent does the consumption of political news influence the individual responsibility to climate change? Discussion and conclusion

5. References

6. Appendix
6.1. Appendix A - Tables
6.2. Appendix B - Graphs

Abstract

This research paper deals with the current issue of the global climate crisis and the personal responsibility to act against it. It investigates how the amount of the consumption of political news can help to gain a greater individual responsibility to try to reduce climate change. Accordingly, this research paper hypothesizes a positive relationship between political news consumption and the individual responsibility to climate change. Through applying multivariate OLS-regressions to a sample of German citizens of the European Social Survey dataset from 2016, the hypothesized relationship can also be observed empirically. A gap regarding the personal responsibility to climate change between people who do consume political news and people who ignore political news can be identified. Based on this results, there can be developed clear policy implications to rise the amount of political news consumption for news ignorers to broaden the extent of an individual's responsibility to act against climate change and to develop remedies against this collective action problem.

1. Climate crises and political news: an introduction

„Human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history. Recent climate changes have had widespread impacts on human and natural systems” (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2014).

Especially during the last decades, the saliency of the climate crisis as a global threat has grown tremendously and polarizes societies all around the world (Fragnière 2016). It partly dominated and continues to dictate media coverage and the public discourse in the political field (Olausson 2009). Correspondingly, the issue of climate change plays an increasingly major role in international institutions and national governments, as in the case of Germany. It is a topic which tangents every human being, because it can have dramatic consequences for everyone's future. In general, there exist several ways in which citizens can be influenced regarding their attitude towards climate change, but the probably most important and influential way is through the impact of the media. On grounds of this socio-ecologic urgency and political significance of that topic the research question of my term paper will be formulated as follows: “ To what extent does the consumption of political news influence the individual responsibility to climate change?” It is crucial to identify potential policy implications, which can help illuminating people, who still deny man-made climate change and do not accept to alter their behaviour. Among other things, this is the goal of this research paper.

This research paper maintains the following structure. At first, I explain the theoretical relationship between political news consumption and an individual's responsibility to climate change and develop a working hypothesis in accordance. Then, I continue with the empirical part, which is mostly stressed in this research paper. This part contains a description of the used data, operationalisation and method, which is followed by a first descriptive overview and the overall statistical analysis of the subject matter, which contains two different models. At the end, I summarize the main results of this term paper, provide a brief conclusion and discuss the implications.

2. How does political news consumption influence the individual responsibility to climate change? Theory and hypothesis

At first, it is crucial to determine a clear definition of the main concept of this research paper: “responsibility to climate change” is defined by “the duty to reduce one's carbon footprint and the duty to promote and support collective action against climate change” (Fragnière 2016). Acting against climate change is oftentimes compared with the paradox of voting, which implicates that the meaning of one single vote is marginally low (Downs 1957). Following to this approach, some people have the opinion that their own behaviour does not have a significant impact on stopping global warming.

According to Fragnière (2016) there exist four main reasons, why people might think that their behaviour is causally irrelevant: “(1) my emissions are too small to be significant; (2) due to climatic thresholds, my emissions cause no marginal harm; (3) there is no direct causal pathway between particular emissions and climate-related harms; and (4) the same amount of greenhouse gas will be emitted anyway” (Fragnière 2016). As a result, a clear large-scale intergenerational collective action problem (Olson 1965) to act against climate change can be identified (Fragnière 2016). Thus, the majority of the world's population are free-riders in this sense.

An important way to remedy this phenomenon is the consumption of political news, which deals with climate change and its consequences. When people are exposed to such media reports more often, they continuously gain more political knowledge about the problems and implications of climate change. A rational individual could no longer deny the climate crisis and even starts to think how it personally can help to prevent worst case scenarios regarding the consequences for humankind and nature in general. In addition, individuals, who maintain an extensive political information process, are more likely to be involved in political discussions (Eveland 2004). Since climate change continues to be an urgent and salient topic, people talk about this issue and learn even more about it while participating in conversations. During the interaction with other people in their social environment, people realize, that they are not alone in their opinion. This social exchange also appeals to one's civil obligations, which individuals desire to fulfil. Through higher political knowledge and regular discussions concerning climate change, a person's political awareness for this current issue of man-made climate change rises and the individual realizes its responsibility to the climate crises more clearly. Therefore, the personal responsibility to reduce one's carbon footprint and the duty to promote and support collective action against climate change grows. All in all, I suppose a positive relationship between the consumption of political news and an individual's responsibility to climate change.

Editorial note: This image was removed due to copyright issues.

On grounds of these theoretical arguments I develop the following working hypothesis: “The more time an individual spends with the consumption of political news, the more responsible an individual feels to climate change.”

Furthermore, it is crucial to control for potential confounding factors with the purpose to isolate the true effect of political news consumption on an individual's responsibility to reduce climate change. Therefore, I include four socio-economic control variables, which are gender, age, income and education. Each of them can have a relevant impact on the relationship of interest. For instance, education can be associated with the amount of time which is spend with consuming und processing political news, because higher educated persons tend to be more interested in political issues. Moreover, people perhaps deal more with political news, the older they become and women are maybe more sensitive to emotional topics like the climate crisis. Further, the household's total net income could influence the possibilities to receive political information about climate change.

Furthermore, this research paper deals with the particular case selection of Germany, because it is considered globally as a country, which behaviour has a significant impact on other states in the word. Its relevance as a role model in matters concerning the climate crisis is undisputed.

Therefore, I consider Germany as a relevant starting point to shed light on the relationship between political news consumption and the responsibility to climate change.

3. An empirical analysis on the relationship between political news consumption and the individual responsibility to climate change

3.1. Description of the data

As a data source I consider the European Social Survey (ESS) as an optimal fit for my research purposes. The 8th version of the ESS contains data of over 30 countries and was gathered in the year 2016 through strict random probability sampling and hour-long face-to-face interviews. It entails a variety of topics, including habits of media consumption, but the speciality of this ESS round is that it deals with environmental questions as well. Thereby, it enables researchers to investigate on attitudes towards climate change and political news consumption at the same time.

3.2. Operationalisation

Moving to the operationalisation of the dependent variable “individual responsibility to climate change”, it is measured at an eleven-point scale from 0 “not at all” to 10 “a great deal” with the question item “To what extent do you feel personal responsibility to reduce climate change?”.

Continuing with the independent variable “political news consumption”, the first version of it is measured on a continuous scale, reaching from 0, indicating that no time is spend with consuming political news, to the maximum of 1428, meaning that 1428 minutes were spent with reading, watching or listening to political news. This main independent variable is operationalised with the question item “On a typical day, about how much time do you spend watching, reading or listening to news about politics and current affairs?”. In addition, I created a second binary version of that independent variable named “consumers of political news”, which is coded as 1, indicating that people consume political news at least one minute per day, and 0, including people, who do not consume political news at all. This categorization enables me to compare these two different groupings and their effects on their individual responsibility to reduce climate change. To get a more intuitive interpretation of both of the news-variables, I recoded its unit of measurement from minutes to hours of consuming news per day.

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