Echo Chambers Over Time: Information Networks of US Climate Policy Elite
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20 Feb 2018
17:00-18:30, Butler Room, Nuffield College
- Nuffield Social Networks Seminar Add to Calendar
University of Exeter, Department of Politics
Our 2015 Nature Climate Change article looked at interviews with Climate Policy Elite in the United States and asked about their sources of ‘expert scientific information.’ With that data we showed that echo chambers surrounding relevant policy instruments were significantly represented over and above the more basic structural components of homophily (the echo) and transitivity (the chamber). This analysis was hampered by the static nature of the collection – we could not determine whether echo chambers were formed by changing opinions on policy or tie formation and dissolution. Our new data repeated the same survey but with a new body of political elite in the Fall of 2016 before the election of Donald Trump and a repeated survey in the spring of 2017. With these new data we are able both to comment on this tumultuous time in American politics and evaluate temporal change in echo chambers.