Protest Movements and the Climate Emergency Declarations of 2019: A New Social Media Logic to Connect and Participate in Politics

Sammanfattning: This thesis investigates the relationship between contemporary climate protest movements (Extinction Rebellion and Fridays For Future) and governmental bodies in European countries that declared a climate emergency in 2019. The primary contribution of this thesis is to demonstrate how emerging communication practices by these movements compare to the perceived influence of such practices among political decisionmakers in their governing bodies’ votes for a climate emergency declaration. Twitter content (tweets by movement accounts) surrounding protest actions of the climate movements was coded using concepts deduced from theoretical literature of participation, media and communication. Themes induced from this data were also used for coding. A thematic analysis of empirical interview text from semi-structured interviews of nine politicians in eight governmental bodies (six German city councils, that of Innsbruck, Austria and the Swiss cantonal parliament of Vaud) on this subject matter was done similarly. Relational thematic analyses of both datasets influenced the coding of one another. A frame analysis grounded in these data studied the use of social media imagery and text by the two movements. Another look at the interview data reflects the influence these movements had on climate emergency declarations via comparison of politicians’ stated impressions of the movements’ participation/influences with formations of tweeted movement frames. The data support the hypothesis that citizens engage via the connective power of personalized participatory culture on social media, enabling political participation. Today, we see a shift away from a political logic of social movements abiding to strong shared identity and meaning through frames of collective action. Instead, a social media logic, which aims to achieve the same functions, operates in loosely networked movements based on individualized frames of youth identity. This ‘connective identity’ bridges the participatory culture of social media with offline political participation in the streets and halls of power.