PNAS:资助气候变化论述

摘要 : 美国耶鲁大学计算分析提示，企业的资助很可能影响与气候变化有关的两极分化的文本的本质与内容。

美国耶鲁大学计算分析提示，企业的资助很可能影响与气候变化有关的两极分化的文本的本质与内容。政治两极分化已经成为了气候变化政策讨论的一个标志，不同部门的多个群体对气候与能源的公共论述有贡献。为了量化企业资助在气候变化论述中的影响，Justin Farrell分析了在1993年到2013年间在气候变化反运动中活跃的164个组织撰写了超过3900万个词的文本。这组作者研究了这些文本的意识形态内容，以及撰写这些文本的这些组织在得到研究的这些年份里是否获得了来自埃克森美孚或科赫家族基金会提供的资助。这组作者发现，与没有得到来自这些企业参与者的组织相比，得到来自这两个企业参与者之一的资助的组织更可能撰写出两极分化的文本。此外，这组作者说，企业资助可能影响了撰写出的文本的意识形态内容。这组作者说，这些结果提供了此前提出的气候变化辩论中的资助影响的定量证据，以及一个用于整合文本与撰写文本的网络的分析模型。

原文链接：

Corporate funding and ideological polarization about climate change

原文摘要：

Drawing on large-scale computational data and methods, this research demonstrates how polarization efforts are influenced by a patterned network of political and financial actors. These dynamics, which have been notoriously difficult to quantify, are illustrated here with a computational analysis of climate change politics in the United States. The comprehensive data include all individual and organizational actors in the climate change countermovement (164 organizations), as well as all written and verbal texts produced by this network between 1993–2013 (40,785 texts, more than 39 million words). Two main findings emerge. First, that organizations with corporate funding were more likely to have written and disseminated texts meant to polarize the climate change issue. Second, and more importantly, that corporate funding influences the actual thematic content of these polarization efforts, and the discursive prevalence of that thematic content over time. These findings provide new, and comprehensive, confirmation of dynamics long thought to be at the root of climate change politics and discourse. Beyond the specifics of climate change, this paper has important implications for understanding ideological polarization more genErally, and the increasing role of private funding in determining why certain polarizing themes are created and amplified. Lastly, the paper suggests that future studies build on the novel approach taken here that integrates large-scale textual analysis with social networks.

doi: 10.1073/PNAS.1509433112

作者：Justin Farrell

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