Time for Climate Action? Political Actors’ Uses of Twitter to Focus Public Attention on the Climate Crisis During the 2019 Danish General Election

Abstract

This article examines civil society uses of Twitter to promote the climate crisis as an issue in the 2019 national election campaign in Denmark. Theoretically, we draw on Cammaerts’s notion of the mediation opportunity structure and Wright, Nyberg, De Cock, and Whiteman’s notion of climate imaginaries. Methodologically, we draw on Bennett and Segerberg’s approach to studying networked interactions on Twitter. Our findings show that neither the legacy press nor MP candidates used climate-related hashtags promoted by civil society actors. MP candidates did frequently use climate-related hashtags. Nonetheless, these were mainly center-left candidates who mostly called for climate action to be propelled by green growth and technological solutions, while civil society actors called for climate action to be propelled by solidarity and systemic change. We discuss how these articulations of the climate crisis have implications for climate imaginaries and, ultimately, possibilities to act.