Leaders' ‘Green’ Posts. The Environmental Issues Shared by Politicians on Facebook

Abstract

Is Facebook “green”? Do political leaders use this social medium to spread information on green policies? The aim of this paper is to investigate on whether and how Facebook is used by politicians as an arena to spread environmental policy proposals or simply information about the environment. The study covers 127 Facebook pages of political leaders in 31 different advanced industrial democracies. The 127 pages have been under observation for 26 months and 99,234 posts were scrutinized. 25,151 out of these 99,234 posts were manually coded and analyzed in order to measure how often contemporary leaders use Facebook to talk about environmental issues. We found that: (i) environmental issues do not represent a relevant concern for the main political leaders of contemporary advanced industrial democracies; (ii) left wing and younger leaders are the ones who used Facebook the most for spreading information about environmental issues; and (iii) relevant differences between leaders of countries with different levels of economic wealth and environmental pollution are noted in regard to Western countries.

Politicians’ use of Facebook during elections

“…The second phase of the analysis looked for the themes or subjects appearing in the posts collected. Past studies have examined the subjects or themes discussed in the social media pages of both political parties and politicians (Adams and McCorkindale, 2013; Aharony, 2012; Bronstein, 2013; Ceccobelli and Cotta, 2016; Justinussen, 2015; Larsson, 2017a). Following are the subject categories revealed in the analysis of the data: Economy: economic indicators or data and/or the candidate’s proposals on economic issues. Education: educational issues or problems and/or the candidate’s proposals on the subject. Elections: political propaganda depicting the politician’s proposals and/or negative propaganda against their opponents. Party: various issues addressing the party mission, policy and activities. Politician: issues relating to the politician himself, including personal life and activities. Security: issues concerning to Israel security, including Israeli–Palestinian conflict, ramifications and consequences of the conflict. Society: various social issues such as illegal immigration, poverty, social inequality and unemployment. Announcements: calling citizens to participate in meeting or rallies.…”

Editorial Introduction to the First Issue of European Policy Analysis (EPA)

“…Hegelich () presents machine learning techniques, adopts them and discusses applications for Policy Analysis and challenges that come with the applications. Ceccobelli and Cotta () show that apart from leftist and young politicians major political actors do not give environmental issues on facebook a very relevant concern.…”