Nationalist Polarization and the Fight over Climate Change in the US and Canada

• In Event: Communication-Based Drivers and Political Consequences of Affective Polarization

Abstract

Many have pointed out that climate change policy is a highly polarized issue in the US and Canada (e.g., Dunlap and McCright 2008; Lachapelle and Borick 2022). The explanations for this polarization foreground the role of political communication (e.g., Weingart, Engels and Pansegrau 2000), particularly how vested interests push their agendas, how the media frames the issue as a debate and how partisans send cues (e.g., Oreskes and Conway 2011; Boykoff and Boykoff 2007, Fisher et al. 2012; Merkley and Stecula 2018). Underpinning much of this work is a foundational theory that the public is more likely to accept cues from elites as legitimate if they share “cultural values” with them (Kahan 2013; Kahan et al. 2010). However, the mechanisms that prime the public to receive messages from “cultural allies” – that is how they can decode the “cultural values” of the elites sending cues – is less well understood. One of the obvious – but woefully understudied – ways that elites can create a connection with the public is through nationalist rhetoric (Smith 2009). In this paper we explore the role of nationalism in this process – highlighting its role in priming both climate skeptics and climate activists to receive messages from partisan elites in both the US and Canada.

To trace the role of nationalism we explore how political elites draw from notions of national identity in their political messaging on climate change policy. This analysis builds on previous work that is showing there is an emergent, broader “nationalist polarization” in US politics, whereby Democrats are drawing from a more inclusive, liberal notion of American identity and Republicans are drawing from a more exclusive, illiberal notion of American identity (Schertzer and Woods, 2022; Woods et al. 2023; Bonikowski et al. 2021). While Canada has largely avoided the resurgence in nationalism and populism evident in the US (Triadafilopoulos 2021), it still has considerable, long-standing cleavages over national identity, particularly contestation over its nature as a uni-national or multi-national federation (Schertzer and Woods 2011). Our main argument in the paper is that this contestation over national identity – this “nationalist polarization” - is shaping political communication on climate change, and that this is reinforcing divisions between climate skeptics and activists. To make this case we conduct an automated content analysis using a lexicon, dictionary-based approach to investigate how nationalist rhetoric is used in media stories on climate change in major newspapers between 2015 and 2024 in the US and Canada.

Authors

• Robert Schertzer, University of Toronto

• Eric Taylor Woods, University of Plymouth