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An empirical examination of echo chambers in US climate policy networks

Nature Climate Change volume 5, pages 782–786 (2015)Cite this article

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A Corrigendum to this article was published on 23 October 2015

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Abstract

Diverse methods have been applied to understand why science continues to be debated within the climate policy domain. A number of studies have presented the notion of the ‘echo chamber’ to model and explain information flows across an array of social settings, finding disproportionate connections among ideologically similar political communicators. This paper builds on these findings to provide a more formal operationalization of the components of echo chambers. We then empirically test their utility using survey data collected from the community of political elites engaged in the contentious issue of climate politics in the United States. Our survey period coincides with the most active and contentious period in the history of US climate policy, when legislation regulating carbon dioxide emissions had passed through the House of Representatives and was being considered in the Senate. We use exponential random graph (ERG) modelling to demonstrate that both the homogeneity of information (the echo) and multi-path information transmission (the chamber) play significant roles in policy communication. We demonstrate that the intersection of these components creates echo chambers in the climate policy network. These results lead to some important conclusions about climate politics, as well as the relationship between science communication and policymaking at the elite level more generally.

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Figure 1: Network building blocks of an echo chamber.
Figure 2: Ego networks coloured by degree of agreement with ‘There should be an international binding commitment on all nations to reduce GHG emissions’.
Figure 3: Images for terms used in the exponential random graph models.
Figure 4: ERGM results.

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Change history

  • 01 October 2015

    In the version of this Article originally published, the colouration and detail in Fig. 2 were incorrect. These errors have been corrected in the online versions of the Article.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the US National Science Foundation (BCS-0826892) and the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) (DBI-1052875). The authors would like to thank K. Krimmel and M. Abascal for their help in collecting some of the data used in this paper. The authors would also like to thank P. Leifeld, M. Palmer and P. Cohen for providing comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, 1 Park Place, Suite 300 Annapolis, Maryland 21401, USA,

    Lorien Jasny

  2. Q-Step Centre, University of Exeter, Exeter, Devon EX4 4SB, UK

    Lorien Jasny

  3. Department of Sociology, University of Maryland, 2112 Art-Sociology, College Park Maryland 20742, USA,

    Joseph Waggle & Dana R. Fisher

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  1. Lorien Jasny
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Contributions

D.R.F. directed data collection. L.J. was responsible for data analysis. J.W. cleaned data and prepared reports and drafts of the manuscript. All authors contributed to project design, write-up of findings, and revisions.

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Correspondence to Dana R. Fisher.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Jasny, L., Waggle, J. & Fisher, D. An empirical examination of echo chambers in US climate policy networks. Nature Clim Change 5, 782–786 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2666

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