Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/233529 
Year of Publication: 
2021
Citation: 
[Journal:] Patterns [ISSN:] 2666-3899 [Volume:] 2 [Issue:] 1 [Article No.:] 100169 [Publisher:] Elsevier [Place:] Amsterdam [Year:] 2021
Publisher: 
Elsevier, Amsterdam
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.
Subjects: 
renewable energy policy
German energy transition
attention cycle
newspaper content analysis
framing
structural topic model
text mining
natural language processing
sentiment analysis
time-series analysis
JEL: 
C1
C8
H23
L50
O13
O3
O33
O38
Q42
Q48
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc-nd Logo
Document Type: 
Article
Document Version: 
Published Version
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