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Tipping the Parliamentary Talk, Sprinting the Climate Policy Walk : A Computational Content Analysis using Natural Language Processing to describe the Swedish Parliamentary Climate Debate 2010-2021 and the Evidence for and Transformative Potential of Social Tipping

Social tipping in Swedish Parliamentary Debate on Climate Change can access transformative policy pathways to realise safe and just futures for all. In this thesis, social tipping processes is applied as a theory of social change to understand, identify, and navigate such instances of abrupt self-reinforcing change. The aim is to describe topics of the Swedish Parliamentary Debate on Climate Change 2010-2021, understand how political salience affects the structure of debate, and identify barriers and enablers for social tipping in parliamentary debate. In this pursuit, a mixed-methods approach based on computational content analysis is applied to study patterns emerging from two natural language processing models, a deep learning classifier and a Structural Topic Model. The results indicate that the last decade was decisive to diversifying the parliamentary debate on climate change beyond energy politics, as contemporary debate has a broader focus on the green transition of industry and transportation. Since early 2018, the intensity of debate has doubled from 2.5% to 5% of parliamentary debate, plausibly due to increased issue contention between governing parties and coalitions. Two case studies of politically salient topics, climate targets (16) and energy politics (22), indicate that social tipping in parliamentary debate is a complex and context dependent social process. The political consensus on Sweden’s long-term goals carries transformative potential, however, as climate issues are increasingly contested there is an increased risk of policy lock-ins. To facilitate social tipping, parliamentarians should transcend imaginary lock-ins to the status quo by promoting global diffusion of stringent net-zero targets and inclusive and fair policies for the green transition. / What makes effective climate policy politically feasible? Formas-ID 2020-00175

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-205531
Date January 2022
CreatorsBjerser, Petter
PublisherStockholms universitet, Stockholm Resilience Centre
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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