Party Cues in the News: Elite Opinion Leadership and Climate Skepticism

Supporters of the Republican Party have become much more skeptical of the science of climate change since the 1990s. We argue that this phenomenon can be explained by a model of top-down persuasion by party elites. We construct aggregate measures of climate skepticism from nearly 200 public opinion polls at the quarterly level from 2001 to 2014 and at the annual level from 1986 to 2014. We also build time series measures of possible contributors to climate skepticism using an automated media content analysis. Our analyses provide evidence that cues from party elites – especially from Democrats – are associated with aggregate dynamics in climate change skepticism including among supporters of the Republican Party. We then conduct a party cue survey experiment on a sample of 3,000 Americans through Amazon Mechanical Turk to provide more evidence of causality. Together, these results suggest we should see climate change skepticism through the lens of elite-led opinion formation. CONT. — pdf

Eric Merkley (U. of Toronto) & Dominik Stecula (Penn)