Deborah Lynn Guber. 2021. “Public Opinion and the Classical Tradition: Redux in the Digital Age,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 85 (4): forthcoming.
Digital trace data have the potential to offer rich insight into complex behaviors that were once out of reach, but its use has raised vital and unresolved questions about what is—or is not—public opinion. Building on the work of James Bryce, Lindsay Rogers, Herbert Blumer, Paul Lazarsfeld, and more, this essay revisits the discipline’s historical roots and draws parallels between past theory and present practice. Today, scholars treat public opinion as the summation of individual attitudes, weighted equally and expressed anonymously at static points in time through polls, yet prior to the advent of survey research, it was conceived as something intrinsically social and dynamic. In an era dominated by online discussion boards and social media platforms, the insights of this earlier “classical tradition” offer two pathways forward. First, for those who criticize computational social science as poorly theorized, it provides a strong justification for the work that data scientists do in text mining and sentiment analysis. And second, it offers clues for how emerging technologies might be leveraged effectively for the study of public opinion in the future.
Deborah Lynn Guber, Jeremiah Bohr, and Riley E. Dunlap. 2021. “‘Time to Wake Up’: Climate Change Advocacy in a Polarized Congress, 1996-2015.” Environmental Politics, 30 (4): 538-558. DOI: 10.1080/09644016.2020.1786333. Published online: July 7, 2020.
Scholars who study the failure of climate change policy in the United States tend to focus on the mechanics of denial and the coordinated efforts of political operatives, conservative think tanks, and partisan news outlets to cast doubt on what has become overwhelming scientific consensus. In contrast, this work seeks to address a factor that has been understudied until now—the role of climate change advocacy in the U.S. Congress. Using quantitative text analysis on a corpus of floor speeches published in the Congressional Record between 1996 and 2015, we find notable differences in the language partisans use. Democrats communicate in ways that are message-based, emphasizing the weight of scientific evidence, while Republicans tend towards a softer, cue-based narrative based on anecdotes and storytelling. We end with a discussion of what climate change advocates can hope to accomplish through the “politics of talk,” especially in an age of heightened polarization.