Reducing global emissions will require a global cosmopolitan culture built from detailed attention to conflicting national climate change frames (interpretations) in media discourse. The authors analyze the global field of media climate change discourse using 17 diverse cases and 131 frames. They find four main conflicting dimensions of difference: validity of climate science, scale of ecological risk, scale of climate politics, and support for mitigation policy. These dimensions yield four clusters of cases producing a fractured global field. Positive values on the dimensions show modest association with emissions reductions. Data-mining media research is needed to determine trends in this global field.

The United States, Germany, and Japan - the world's three most powerful and successful free market societies - differ strikingly in how their governments relate to their economies. Comparing Policy Networks reports the results of collaborative research by three teams investigating the social organization and policymaking processes of national labor policy domains in the United States, Germany, and Japan during the 1980s. The researchers gathered information about policy goals, communication patterns, and political support connections from 350 key national organizations, including labor unions, business associations, public interest groups, government agencies, and political parties. These networks reveal similar conflict divisions between business and labor interests, but also distinctive patterns within each nation. Unique combinations of informal policy-making networks and the national political institutions may in part explain the differences in power structures and legislative decisions.

The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) asserts that disagreement over policy core beliefs divides organizations into competing coalitions. We apply Discourse Network Analysis to 1,410 statements in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and USA Today to investigate what kinds of beliefs contribute to coalition formation in the climate change policy debate in the news media in the United States. We find that the beliefs concerning the reality of anthropogenic climate change, the importance of ecology over economy and desirability of governmental regulation divide organizations into three advocacy coalitions: the economy, ecology and science coalitions. Policy preferences such as cap and trade do not; they find support across coalition lines. Based on these findings, we suggest that ACF theory could be clarified to better account for how beliefs concerning policy instruments contribute to coalition formation. In some policy domains, policy instruments are where opposing coalitions find agreement. In others, they are more divisive.

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