CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Durgala, Vladimir |
|---|---|
| Title | Do People Listen To The Media And Greta? |
| Summary | This thesis empirically investigates the drivers of public opinion on climate change. Specifically, the thesis tests the effect of media coverage of climate change and the effect of the global climate strikes. Employing empirical analysis, the evidence from the sample country of the United Kingdom indicates that the amount of media reports related to climate change positively affects people's worries about climate change. The number of articles published within the previous week has a stronger effect on people’s attitudes, compared to the number of media reports on the day when their attitude was surveyed. Additionally, this thesis explores the heterogeneous effect between the age categories of respondents, which shows that while the younger generation (18-30) is affected by the number of reports on the given day of attitude sampling, the older generation (above 55) is influenced more by intense media coverage one week prior. This thesis found no evidence of the effect of the global climate strikes on people's attitudes, although this finding may be due to the small sample size in this test. In testing whether people who are more worried about climate change behave more ecologically, there appears to be no causal link between these two. The findings confirm the strong influence of media, but also indicate that fear is not enough of a driver to produce a change in behaviour, thus more needs to be done in order to limit the impact of climate change. |
| Supervisor | Littvay, Levente |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/durgala_vladimir.pdf |
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