It’s not exactly breaking news that Democratic and Republican legislators are deeply divided on the issue of climate change. Now, a new study by researchers at Northeastern University suggests it may not be just climate change, but science as a whole, that has become a wedge issue in Congress. And they used an unusual tool to arrive at their result: Twitter.
The whole thing started as idle curiosity. Well, not quite idle. Like many ocean scientists, Brian Helmuth and some colleagues at Northeastern University’s Marine Science Center have been grappling with how to put the information they hold in front of decision-makers.
Why? The ocean absorbs about thirty percent of human-produced carbon dioxide and more than ninety percent of the heat trapped by such greenhouse gas emissions. That’s impacting everything from ocean currents and water chemistry, to fisheries, coral reefs, microscopic marine plants … and the scientists who study them. Many ocean scientists are now de facto climate scientists.
Helmuth and his colleagues wanted to know how they could tailor their communication efforts to reach interested legislators. So, they started reaching out to Congressional staffers, and got nowhere.
"Everything is so polarized in D.C. that very few people would talk to us about this,” says Helmuth. “What we ended up doing was stalking senators and their staffers on Twitter as an objective way of figuring out what their interests are, what their projected images are, and – hopefully – some idea of where they’re getting their information from.”
Rather than stalking, it might be more accurate to say that the research team was geeking out on big data. They analyzed all 78,753 Twitter accounts followed by U.S. Senators. They identified accounts focused on media and politics, science, as a whole, and climate change, specifically. And then, they analyzed who follows and communicates with whom.
The analysis showed that the vast majority of Democrats and Republicans inhabit almost mutually exclusive Twitter-spheres - echo chambers - with just a small number of cross-overs. Democrats follow more climate-related Twitter accounts than their Republican colleagues. Furthermore, Democrats follow an average of three times more science-related Twitter handles, suggesting that the whole of science, not just climate change, is becoming a party value.
“We were really surprised,” says Helmuth. “We went into this with the explicit goal of not trying to separate Democrats and Republicans. It just fell out of the analysis as the most obvious difference we could see.”
To see if those differences hold up in real life, Helmuth and his colleagues compared Senators’ predilection for scienc-y Twitter accounts to their voting record on two amendments to the 2015 Keystone XL bill. One of those affirmed that climate change is real and human-caused. Republican Senators who crossed party lines to vote “yes” on that question are more similar to Democrats in their science follows than to their fellow Republicans, even though their Twitter profiles overall resemble other Republicans.
Helmuth says those science-minded, cross-over Republicans represent an opportunity for scientists, like himself, to engage a new set of legislators in conversations about ocean and climate science.