Putting the Planet on the Ballot: Climate Change Framing in 2016 and 2018 Political Ads
Open Access
- Author:
- Bell, Kelsey
- Area of Honors:
- Advertising/Public Relations
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Fuyuan Shen, Thesis Supervisor
Fuyuan Shen, Thesis Honors Advisor
Colleen Connolly-Ahern, Faculty Reader - Keywords:
- political advertising
politics
climate change
framing
content analysis
climate change framing
political campaigns
political communications - Abstract:
- Climate change has become a rising political issue as its impacts have become more and more evident throughout the world. General references or entire campaign ads addressing climate change or climate-related issues further shows how important this issue has become to influence American political candidates to begin addressing this issue in their campaign advertisements. This is because political candidates use their campaign ads to shape the voting public’s perceptions about an issue or the candidate’s platform to try and win their support. By examining how a candidate approaches an issue like climate change in his or her political ad, I can research how the candidate intends to influence the debate and the public’s opinion of the political issue. Based on this rationale, I conducted a quantitative research study on political advertising in the U.S. by performing a content analysis on over eighty gubernatorial, congressional, or presidential political ads from the 2016 and 2018 election cycles. The findings show that more Democratic candidates address climate change in their 2016 and 2018 political ads. However, there wasn’t a significant amount of intra-group variation when it came to climate change terminology or issue frames. For example, the Attribution of Responsibility Frame was the most frequently used issue frame in both major political parties’ campaign ads. Instead, climate change attributes like terminology, as well as whether the ad looked at climate change from a problem or solution perspective, were associated with the candidate’s political status.