Topic Modeling Uncovers Shifts in Media Framing of the German Renewable Energy Act

Joris Dehler-Holland, Kira Schumacher and Wolf Fichtner

EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, 2021, vol. 2, issue 1

Abstract: Renewable energy policies have been recognized as a cornerstone in the transition toward low-emission energy systems. Media reports are an important variable in the policy-making process, interrelating politicians and the public. To understand the changes in media framing of a pioneering renewable energy support act, we collected 6,645 articles from five Germany-wide newspapers between 2000 and 2017 on the German Renewable Energy Act. We developed a structural topic model based on a change-point analysis to assess the temporal patterns of newspaper coverage. We introduced the notion of topic sentiment to elucidate the emotional content of topics. The results show that after its enactment, optimism about renewable energies dominated the media agenda. After 2012, however, the Renewable Energy Act was more associated with its costs. Such shifts in renewable energy policy framing may limit political leverage to reach ambitious climate and energy targets.

Keywords: renewable energy policy; German energy transition; attention cycle; newspaper content analysis; framing; structural topic model; text mining; natural language processing; sentiment analysis; time-series analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C1 C8 H23 L50 O13 O3 O33 O38 Q42 Q48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:espost:233529

DOI: 10.1016/j.patter.2020.100169

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