Climate Change Communication Among European and American Politicians from 2015 to 2020 on X

Climate change is a multifaceted issue that encompasses environmental, social, cultural, and political dimensions. Greater involvement and awareness have been fostered among online community members thanks to the rise of the internet and the use of social media networks. Among these, X (formerly known as Twitter) stands out as a catalyst for creating shared knowledge, connectedness, and concern among its members, contributing to a greater sense of responsibility. Much attention has been paid to the influence of X on politicians, who use it as a vital political tool to engage with the public, set agendas, and signal policy intentions. This paper delves into an analysis of climate change communication on X by 36 politicians from the EU and the U.S. It seeks to determine whether there is a correlation between language use and geographical location based on the assumption that the European Union has had a more stable and coherent concern about climate change over time, compared to the United States (Wendler, 2022). By means of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, based on a modern-diachronic approach, multiword expressions extracted from an ad hoc corpus of 163 753 tweets are examined to identify their lexical saliency (Baker, 2006). Despite limitations, this paper is an attempt to shed light on the communicative strategies employed by politicians in addressing climate issues and highlights the need for further investigation into climate change communication on a global scale.