Learning about climate politics during COP 21: Explaining a diminishing knowledge gap.

ABSTRACT: A basic understanding of climate politics is necessary for citizens to assess their government's policies. Media use is supposed to enable learning, while widening knowledge gaps. We analyze whether such a gap opened up in times of intense media coverage during the 2015 climate conference in Paris and explain learning through hierarchical regression analyses, drawing on a 3-month panel survey (n = 1121) in Germany. We find a diminishing knowledge gap: people with low previous knowledge catch up on the better informed, but overall knowledge remained low and learning was limited. This suggests a ceiling effect: possibly journalistic media did not provide enough new information for the well-informed. Closing knowledge gaps may also be explained by the media system with public televisio

SUBMITTER: De Silva-Schmidt F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9131408 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature