View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Bern Open Repository and Information System (BORIS) 1 POLITICIZATION OF SCIENCE Politicization of science: How climate change skeptics use experts and scientific evidence in their online communication Hannah Schmid-Petri University of Passau Dr.-Hans-Kapfinger-Str. 12 94030 Passau, Germany email:
[email protected], phone: +49-(0)851-509-3420 Abstract: This study, using the discussion about climate change in the United States as an example, ana- lyzes the research question of how climate change skeptics use experts and scientific evidence in their online communication. Two different strategies are distinguished: legitimation and crit- icism. The study conducts a quantitative content analysis of online documents to answer the research question. The results show that the deduced strategies are an important part of the communication of climate change skeptics, who more commonly use the criticism strategy than the legitimation strategy. Results are further differentiated for different actor types and various types of experts. Keywords: expert, expert knowledge, online communication, uncertainty, climate change Acknowledgments: This publication was created in the context of the Research Unit "Political Communication in the Online World" (1381), subproject 7, which is funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation. The subproject is also funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF, 100017E-135915). 2 POLITICIZATION OF SCIENCE Politicization of science: How climate change skeptics use experts and scientific evidence in their online communication 1 Introduction Political issues and public controversies often refer to scientific knowledge (e.g. about health or environmental protection; Scheufele 2014).