Power Through Visibility: How Policy Narratives Matter in Climate Change Debate on X

Original

Power Through Visibility: How Policy Narratives Matter in Climate Change Debate on X

Simon Bulian, Anne‐Marie Parth, Maria Becker, Lars Tapken

Abstract

ABSTRACT Research on policy narratives has shown that political actors employ certain narrative strategies in their competition for attention. Although we know that actors' narrative strategies coincide with existing power constellations (e.g., government vs. opposition), the ways in which they influence public attention remain largely unknown. In this paper, we ask whether different narrative strategies laid down by the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) vary in the attention they create on social media. To do so, we identify policy narratives within the German debate on climate change on X with Large Language Models (LLMs) and estimate their impact on attention through statistical analysis. Our results suggest that tweets with a policy narrative on climate change tend to be more visible than tweets on climate change without such a narrative. In particular, tweets that link policy solutions on climate change with the narrative characters villains or heroes tend to receive more attention on social media. This suggests that using both heroic and villainous policy narratives in public debate may be an effective way of generating public attention. The results challenge the widely held assumption in NPF research that devil‐ and angel‐shift narrative strategies influence agenda‐setting dynamics in the policy process differently.