Framing Political Communication on Climate Change: A Topic Modeling Analysis of German Governmental Institutions’ Press Releases

Beyond designing climate policies, the communication strategies and storytelling approaches employed by policymakers largely shape public engagement in climate mitigation and adaptation activities. This is due to the fact that communication design impacts the decision-making processes of information recipients, a phenomenon known as choice architecture, thereby influencing individual attitudes, behaviors, and actions. In an effort to understand the nature and impact of German political climate communications, this research analyzes climate-related press releases from the German Federal Government (Bundeskanzleramt) and all 15 ministries to uncover key patterns, narratives, frames, and sentiments. A comprehensive text dataset was constructed via scraping the publicly available press releases from the websites of each governmental institution, in addition to requesting those press release texts per email from the institutions directly in cases of difficulties in scraping or missing documents online. The resulting dataset of press releases for the three-year timeframe 2021-2023 (n = 9707), which is limited to the current legislative period, was then filtered for documents relevant to climate change, resulting in a final dataset of 3082 documents. Those documents are currently being analyzed using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling, comparing and contrasting emerging communication patterns between 1) individual political institutions and 2) political parties and stakeholders, as well as mapping the development of those topics over time. The results are positioned to enable a deeper understanding of the impact of those communications, promote learning among the various political actors, and support the improvement of future communication designs to better achieve desired sustainability goals.