Publications

Work in Progress

• From the Front Page to the Ballot Paper. The Effect of Climate Justice Grassroots Groups on Election Outcomes
  Submitted
  Abstract

  How do grassroots groups influence electoral behaviour? While some scholars suggest that experiencing protest events sways the vote, others emphasise the role of the mass media in diffusing the concerns of a given group. I test these propositions using the 2019 climate justice mobilisation in Switzerland, where two parties campaign on climate change. My empirical analysis capitalises on original data on protest events and media coverage, and leverages fine-grained information on citizens' electoral behaviour. While the difference-in-difference analysis suggests that citizens are unaffected by whether or not their constituency experienced protest events, I find that the media's attention to the protest events and to climate change does matter. Using generalised linear regression and mediation models, I demonstrate that regional media attention to the protest events increases the Green Party's predicted vote share by 10.3%. Furthermore, I find that the regional media attention to climate change increases the Green Liberal Party's predicted vote share by 6.2%. Apart from emphasising the media's influence, the findings illustrate how the presence of several issue-owners affects vote choice.

• Constant Dropping Wears Away a Stone. Dynamics between Environmental Collective Action, Elite Opinion Leadership, and Public Opinion
  Draft available upon request
  Abstract

  How do social movement organisations achieve the societal changes they seek? Scholars commonly argue that organisations require the media's attention to diffuse their concerns among the public. However, the field continues to struggle with causally linking organisations to their outcomes and empirically uncovering the underlying processes. Furthermore, various conceptualisations of social movement and public opinion, and the focus of the literature on the US complicate testing and developing theory. I address these limitations by analysing the dynamic interactions between the Swiss environmental movement, the public, and various factors capturing opinion leadership by the elite from 1974 to 2020. Relying on original and secondary data, I leverage 100 survey questions on environmental issues, which I collate utilising the dyad ratios algorithm and hierarchical Item Response Theory. These time series are the first without interpolated values and advance existing measures for the years 1974 to 1993. To this data, I apply vector autoregression models, Granger causality tests, and the impulse response function, and decompose the forecast errors' variance. I find that the national government's attention to environmental issues encouraged the national parliament to engage with these issues, which spurred newspaper coverage of collective action events. These discursive shifts around environmental protection strengthened the public's preference for environmental protection, consistently resulting in a higher vote share for the Green Party and the Green Liberal Party.

• The Discursive Construction of Meanings. How The Media Depict Protest Events Against Infrastructure
  Draft available upon request
  Abstract

  Why can media coverage of environmental social movement organisations encourage people to vote for the Green Party despite the fact that the literature consistently finds that journalists denounce the activities of these organisations? I examine disruptive protest events against Alpine transportation infrastructure between 1980 and 2024. My empirical analysis draws on original data encompassing 452 newspaper articles on 42 protest events, which I analyse using a structuralist narrative approach. Contrary to the literature, my findings show that Swiss newspapers tend to acknowledge and sympathise with the concerns of the disruptors. However, I also find that the media reinforce negative stereotypes stemming from the social position and ethnicity of the disruptors. Additionally, they report more intensely in recent periods and when the disruptors target the causes of climate change. I propose that dominant understandings of the human-nature relation can explain why the media tends to regard environmental degradation as an inevitable outcome of modernisation and progress.

• Birds of a Feather Flock Together. Explaining Spatial Differences in Media Discourse around CO₂-Taxation
  Co-authored with Laura Gatto (Université de Lausanne, Switzerland)
  Abstract

  Ambitious climate policy implies distributional consequences and potentially affects spatially concentrated occupation sectors. Despite the ongoing politicisation of climate change, few studies explore the intersection of public discourses, climate policy, and spatial (in-)justices. This study examines how traditional media shape how spatially defined groups perceive climate policy. We hypothesise that the geographical focus and location of newspapers influence the extent to which journalists address perceived or experienced spatial (in-)justices related to climate policy. Using the case of Switzerland, we conduct a quantitative text analysis of around 2200 newspaper articles reporting on the main climate policy instrument, the so-called CO2-Act. We leverage our data by linking it to the municipality-level outcome of the vote on the CO2-Act, thereby gaining insight into how local discourses shape the voting behaviour of citizens. Furthermore, we intend to complement these insights with a public survey to causally infer how newspaper consumption forms policy preferences.

Media

• Lang, Jessica (29.11.2020): Von der Baracke zum Bijou. Zürcher Studierendenzeitung.
• Lang, Jessica (07.11.2020): Versprich, was du nicht halten willst: Wie Parteien Symbolpolitik betreiben. Das Lamm.
• Lang, Jessica (20.09.2020): Dieser Zirkus braucht kein Zelt. Zürcher Studierendenzeitung.
• Lang, Jessica (29.08.2020): «Tsch-Tsch». Toxische Grillade auf Kosten des Klimas. Das Lamm.
• Lang, Jessica (24.06.2020): Alle Schuld den Herkunftsländern. Die Gender-Politik des UNHCR. Das Lamm.
• Lang, Jessica (10.05.2020): Studieren und Streiken in Frankreich. Zürcher Studierendenzeitung.
• Lang, Jessica (29.11.2019): Als Antisemitismus an der Uni verbreitet war. Zürcher Studierendenzeitung.
• Lang, Jessica (10.10.2019): «Wir sind sicherlich kein elitärer Haufen!» Zürcher Studierendenzeitung.