Climate Policy Elites' Twitter Interactions across Nine Countries
For researchers studying climate policy and social media, this provides empirical evidence of polycentric governance dynamics and cross-national interaction patterns.
The study analyzed 40 million Twitter activities from 904 climate policy actors across nine countries (2017–2022), finding that national policy systems rarely interact directly but are connected through shared engagement with international organizations, activists, and researchers.
Social media is an important space for interactions between climate policy actors, with a burgeoning literature recognizing them as critical platforms of political contestation. We identified Twitter accounts associated with 904 climate change policy actors across nine countries, and collected their activities from 2017--2022, totalling 40 million activities from 16,086 accounts at different organizational levels. We studied these actors and their interactions as a polycentric governance system, emphasizing how boundary blurring between the public and private on social media platforms uniquely shapes the online policy process. Initial results show there is considerable temporal and cross-national variation in how prominent climate-related activities were, but all national policy systems generally responded to climate-related events, such as climate protests, in a similar manner. Examining patterns of interaction within and across countries, we find that these national policy systems rarely directly interact with one another, but are connected through consistently engaging with the same content produced by accounts of international organizations, climate activists, and researchers.