Related papers: Growing polarisation around climate change on soci…
Climate change's impact on human health poses unprecedented and diverse challenges. Unless proactive measures based on solid evidence are implemented, these threats will likely escalate and continue to endanger human well-being. The…
First-best climate policy is a uniform carbon tax which gradually rises over time. Civil servants have complicated climate policy to expand bureaucracies, politicians to create rents. Environmentalists have exaggerated climate change to…
Political polarization, a key driver of social fragmentation, has drawn increasing attention for its role in shaping online and offline discourse. Despite significant efforts, accurately measuring polarization within ideological…
Fostering coordinated pro-environmental behaviors at scale is a key challenge for climate mitigation. Individual actions only generate meaningful impact when they diffuse widely and become socially coordinated, yet monitoring such processes…
This paper introduces a definition of ideological polarization of an electorate around a particular central point. By being flexible about the location or width of the center, this measure enables the researcher to analyze polarization…
Political polarization generates strong effects on society, driving controversial debates and influencing the institutions. Territorial disputes are one of the most important polarized scenarios and have been consistently related to the use…
The rise of social media has fundamentally transformed how people engage in public discourse and form opinions. While these platforms offer unprecedented opportunities for democratic engagement, they have been implicated in increasing…
This study investigates affective polarization among Swedish politicians on Twitter from 2021 to 2023, including the September 2022 parliamentary election. Analyzing over 25,000 tweets and employing large language models (LLMs) for…
In recent years, the ease with which social media can be accessed has led to the unexpected problem of a shrinkage in information sources. This phenomenon is caused by a system that facilitates the connection of people with similar ideas…
Echo chambers are defined by the simultaneous presence of opinion polarization with respect to a controversial topic and homophily, i.e. the preference of individuals to interact with like-minded peers. While recent efforts have been…
Narratives are key interpretative devices by which humans make sense of political reality. In this work, we show how the analysis of conflicting narratives, i.e. conflicting interpretive lenses through which political reality is experienced…
Misinformation about climate change poses a significant threat to societal well-being, prompting the urgent need for effective mitigation strategies. However, the rapid proliferation of online misinformation on social media platforms…
Wildfires are increasing in frequency and size across the western U.S., with some of the deadliest fires in recorded history occurring in the last few years. The public, as well as elected officials, use social media to convey opinions and…
Strategic communication in Twitter is compared between different actor groups with regard to the topic of climate change. The main hypothesis is that different actor groups will be more or less central in the reply-trees depending on their…
Climate change debates have gained increasing visibility on social media, with YouTube emerging as one of the most influential platforms for political communication. Reaching billions of users worldwide, it functions both as a news outlet…
The COVID-19 pandemic brought upon a massive wave of disinformation, exacerbating polarization in the increasingly divided landscape of online discourse. In this context, popular social media users play a major role, as they have the…
Users online tend to join polarized groups of like-minded peers around shared narratives, forming echo chambers. The echo chamber effect and opinion polarization may be driven by several factors including human biases in information…
Background: Social media chatter in 2020 has been largely dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Existing research shows that COVID-19 discourse is highly politicized, with political preferences linked to beliefs and disbeliefs about the…
Brexit, a global pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and record inflation - few legislative bodies have faced such a cascade of shocks as the European Parliament did during its 9th term (2019-2024). Using the Bipartite Configuration…
The existence of polarization and echo chambers has been noted in social media discussions of public concern such as the Covid-19 pandemic, foreign election interference, and regional conflicts. However, measuring polarization and assessing…