Retweets as endorsements: identifying advocacy coalitions with retweet network data

Presenter: Dr. Paul Wagner (Edinburgh Napier Univeritsy, UK)

Identifying the membership of coalitions involved in climate policy processes using survey data can be challenging, even in contexts where it is widely acknowledged that major policy disagreements exist between opposing policymaking elites. This paper investigates what we can learn about coalition membership and structure by analysing the twitter activity of the actors that constitute the Irish climate change policy network. We scraped ~340k tweets, retweets, mentions, and replies related to climate change that originated from accounts managed by individuals and organisations associated with the actors in the Irish climate change policy network between December 2015 and February 2022. An analysis of the 26,000 retweets that form the weighted retweet network among the accounts identifies several communities. These communities closely resemble the coalitions that that we would hypothesize to find involved in Irish climate politics. We validate our findings by analysing network survey data that was collected from the same set of actors in summer 2021, where in our analysis respondents are categorised according to which twitter community they belong.

 Paul Wagner is a Lecturer in management and research methods in the Business School at Napier University in Edinburgh. He previously worked as lecturer at Northumbria University in Newcastle and as a postdoctoral researcher at the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science in Finland.  His research focuses on the study of governance institutions, policy networks, and environmental policymaking processes. His research has appeared in journals such as Social Networks, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Governance, Public Administration, Environmental Politics, and Policy Studies Journal.