Green Populism in New Social Movements

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Green Populism in New Social Movements Green Populism in New Social Movements A qualitative text analysis on Extinction Rebellion’s discourse Jacob Fransson Master Thesis, 15 credits Supervisor: Media and communication studies Paola Sartoretto Sustainable Communication Examiner: Spring 2021 Jönköping University Master thesis, 15 credits School of Education and Communication Course: Master Thesis in Media and Communication 1 Term: Spring 2021 ABSTRACT Writer: Jacob Fransson Title: Green populism in new social movements Subtitle: A qualitative text analysis on Extinction Rebellion’s discourse Language: English Pages: 34 (49) This thesis aims to explore the new concept of green populism and to explore if Extinction Rebellion can be seen as a new social movement. The concept of green populism is based on Cas Mudde’s ideational approach to populism and Dobson’s approach to green ideology. The theories will form a categorization of green populism to see if any of these elements are visible in Extinction Rebellion’s discourse. The combination of the two theories helps to define the elements or categories of green populism: Ecological Crisis of Cosmic Proportion, Victimizing “the People”, Identifying and/or blame the antagonist, Green Action, Scientific Evidencing, and Intergenerational Justice. The theories on new social movements is based on theories from scholars such as Alberto Melucci, Alain Touraine and Manuel Castells to help us understand what characterizes a new social movement. The four following characteristics of new social movements was highlighted: They focus on non-material issues, they tend to emphasize different protest tactics, they often have a horizontal organization, and they often use symbolic action. To answer the research questions in this thesis, a qualitative text analysis will be conducted. A qualitative text analysis focuses on certain selected aspects of the material which are determined by the aim and research questions. The qualitative text analysis is applied to the captions of eight selected Instagram-posts from Extinction Rebellion’s official account. The analysis leads to the conclusion that Extinction Rebellion can be seen as a new social movement, with a few exceptions regarding their focus on non-material issues. Another conclusion is that we were able to find elements of green populism in Extinction Rebellion’s discourse. The final conclusion is that green populism should be seen as a theoretical and analytical tool for analyzing communication rather than a label of environmental actors. Keywords: green populism, populism, green ideology, new social movements, qualitative text analysis, Extinction Rebellion. 1. INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................................... 1 1.2 CONNECTION TO SUSTAINABLE COMMUNICATION ................................................................................................... 2 2. AIM AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS ........................................................................................................... 3 2.1 AIM ....................................................................................................................................................... 3 2.2 RESEARCH QUESTION ................................................................................................................................. 3 3. BACKGROUND ....................................................................................................................................... 3 3.1 EXTINCTION REBELLION .............................................................................................................................. 3 4. RESEARCH REVIEW ................................................................................................................................ 4 4.1 GLOBAL ACTIVISM AND THE LOGIC OF CONNECTIVE ACTION ................................................................................ 4 4.1.1 #MeToo, Networked Acknowledgement, and Connective Action: How “Empowerment Through Empathy” Launched a Social Movement ....................................................................................................... 6 4.2 POPULISM AS A MEANS OF COMMUNICATION ................................................................................................. 6 4.3 ARE LIBERAL STATES GREENER? POLITICAL IDEOLOGY AND CO2 EMISSIONS IN AMERICAN STATES, 1980-2012 .......... 7 4.4 THE EMERGING CONCEPT OF GREEN POPULISM ............................................................................................... 7 4.5 EXTINCTION REBELLION AND NON-VIOLENT DIRECT ACTION ............................................................................... 8 5. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK .................................................................................................................. 9 5.1 CAS MUDDE’S IDEATIONAL APPROACH TO POPULISM ....................................................................................... 9 5.2 DOBSON’S APPROACH TO GREEN IDEOLOGY .................................................................................................. 10 5.3 GREEN POPULISM ................................................................................................................................... 11 5.4 SOCIAL MOVEMENTS ............................................................................................................................... 13 5.5 NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS THEORY ............................................................................................................. 14 5.5.1 Criticism of new social movements theory .................................................................................... 16 6. METHODS ............................................................................................................................................ 17 6.1 QUALITATIVE TEXT ANALYSIS ..................................................................................................................... 17 6.1.1 Motivation for selection of method ............................................................................................... 17 6.2 MATERIAL ............................................................................................................................................. 17 6.2.1 Motivation for selection of material ............................................................................................. 18 6.3 OPERATIONALIZATION .............................................................................................................................. 19 6.3.1 Coding frame ................................................................................................................................. 19 6.4 LIMITATIONS .......................................................................................................................................... 20 6.5 RELIABILITY AND VALIDITY ......................................................................................................................... 21 7. INTERPRETATION AND PRESENTATION OF FINDINGS .......................................................................... 21 7.1 ECOLOGICAL CRISIS OF COSMIC PROPORTIONS ............................................................................................... 22 7.2 VICTIMIZING “THE PEOPLE” ...................................................................................................................... 23 7.3 IDENTIFYING AND/OR BLAMING THE ANTAGONIST .......................................................................................... 25 7.4 GREEN ACTION ....................................................................................................................................... 27 7.5 SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCING ............................................................................................................................ 28 7.6 INTERGENERATIONAL JUSTICE .................................................................................................................... 29 8. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS ........................................................................................................... 30 8.1 THEORY CONTRIBUTION ............................................................................................................................ 33 8.2 SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH ......................................................................................................... 33 1. Introduction In countries all around the globe, we can see that contemporary politics are influenced by populistic ideas and beliefs on all sides of the political spectra. The votes for “populists right” parties in the European Parliament election has doubled from less than 7 percent in the 1960s to 14 percent in the 2010s, while the votes for “populist left” parties went from 3 percent to 13 percent in the same period (Inglehart & Norris, 2016). The rise of populism might be a dangerous development since it politicizes science and tends to give simple answers to complex questions, but on the other hand, it can also help us focus and highlight important issues and illuminate the complex relationship between science and democracy (Davies, 2020). A report published by Stanford University shows that populism poses three major threats to democracies around the world. These three threats are that populism threats to undermine formal institutions, exclude vulnerable groups and minorities, and erode the informal
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