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

Joris Dehler-Holland; Kira Schumacher; Wolf Fichtner

doi:10.1016/j.patter.2020.100169

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

Patterns (N Y). 2020 Dec 22;2(1):100169. doi: 10.1016/j.patter.2020.100169. eCollection 2021 Jan 8.

Authors

Joris Dehler-Holland^{1

2}, Kira Schumacher^{1

2}, Wolf Fichtner^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Institute for Industrial Production, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Hertzstrasse 16, 76187 Karlsruhe, Germany.
² French-German Institute for Environmental Research, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Hertzstrasse 16, 76187 Karlsruhe, Germany.

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: German energy transition; attention cycle; framing; natural language processing; newspaper content analysis; renewable energy policy; sentiment analysis; structural topic model; text mining; time-series analysis.