How Do Political Parties on Reddit Feel About Climate Change: r/Democrats vs r/Republican vs r/Libertarian vs r/GreenParty
The ever-pressing topic of climate change has many layers. Fossil fuels vs green energy, saving the turtles by cutting down on the usage of plastic straws, encouraging society to use fewer disposables to lessen the amount of landfill in fields–the list goes on and on. In recent years, the impact of climate change (as well as whether it is “actually” climate change) has been a topic of discussion. But more importantly, regardless of what the complex issues are with climate change and the environment, should the federal government step in to do anything about it? And if so, what? How do people from different political parties view this issue? And what about it are they focused on talking about?
To begin finding answers to these questions, I turned to the four subreddits on Reddit associated with each of the parties. Subreddits are online communities bounded by a specific trait/interest (political party association in this case) available to users to post, discuss, and interact with other users. Posts typically relate to the title of the subreddit. Because of the openness of subreddit communities where all sorts of information, opinions, and discussions are, it is used for this analysis. It’s a place for everyone to come to discuss any time. Even more so, you can hear the opinions and thoughts of your average person and Reddit user, so there should be a variety of voices heard in these communities. The average people are the base of the people who vote in the elections after all.
Libraries used in this analysis were praw and pandas in Python (and a Jupyter Notebook). I used a Reddit API to investigate data from these subreddits (uses praw): r/Democrats, r/Republican, r/Libertarian, and r/GreenParty. The general analysis consisted of looking at each of the subreddits’ most 100 recent posts (as of 12:10 am EST on 21 September 2020) that had the keywords, “climate change” and/or “environment.” These 100 posts were appended into a list, then into a data frame, then into an Excel spreadsheet. The reason for only the most recent posts is to obtain the most recent topics users are discussing. And the reason for only the top 100 is that in a world of essentially limitless data, it gets difficult to analyze it all. In the future, more posts may be extracted for this project. For this introductory exploratory analysis, no comments were extracted.
Subreddit context! — # Subscribers in Each Subreddit
r/Democrats: 142,661 users
r/Republicans: 145,469 users
r/Libertarian: 424,426 users
r/GreenParty: 18,117 users
Attributes that are analyzed in this data include the post title, post score (number of upvotes), post upvote ratio (the percentage of users who upvoted the post), number of comments, whether the post was pinned (by a moderator of that subreddit), and the total number of awards received by each post (given by other users to exemplary or otherwise noteworthy content).
It’s important to note that in the data collected, we are not so much concerned about the validity of the content in the posts as we are about what it is users are saying, true or not. However, one concern is without the context of comments it can occasionally become difficult to distinguish the tone of the post title.
The data frames of each political party’s set of posts along with a data frame of all those posts combined were exported into an Excel sheet for easier sorting and convenient viewing. A total of 5 data frames from the four subreddits (plus one more that encompasses all the data) were exported (uses pandas). Having several data frames makes for a more organized analysis. Furthermore, creating these data frames took some work since extracting data may be initially messy and comes in clumped-up strings of words. For data to be analyzed, shaping them into categorized tables using pandas was necessary. Writing them to Excel allows for the case where others may want to view the information in a more accessible way.
Additionally, a more narrow and specific analysis was explored. From each subreddit, additional keywords were searched to find what kinds of posts were created in regards to three categories: the 2020 presidential candidates, money and finances, and recent news. Titles extracted with these keywords needed to have at least one. The keywords used for these categories were the following:
Presidential candidate: Joe, Biden, Donald, Trump
Money and finances: fund, invest, $, tax
Recent News: 2020, recent, current
Furthermore, from those three categories, titles were sorted in descending order by post score and post upvote ratio. Using the post score and post upvote ratio can be useful for looking at how many users agree with or like a post. An example of that code and its results is below.
When exporting data to Excel, the six tables contained the top 10 posts of each category (of both score and upvote ratio). More usable tables were created from these data frames but were not included here because they require further analysis. There is a lot of overlap because highly upvoted posts also likely have high upvote ratios. However, highly upvoted ratios may not necessarily have a high number of upvotes. At this time, this section of data was not as thoroughly analyzed.
Results
The five tables below display the top 5 post titles when the data is sorted by highest score, lowest score, highest upvote ratio, lowest upvote ratio, most comments, and least comments. This is for all of the subreddit data combined and each subreddit. Note that there will be an overlap of post titles between some categories as well.
All Subreddits
The purpose of this table is to see which posts are the highest or lowest in their respective measurements among the four subreddits. The only problem with this is that not all users are on all subreddits (rather, they are likely only to be on one of them) and not all the subreddits have the same number of users subscribed to them. r/GreenParty, for example, has significantly fewer users than the other three subreddits. There are still some things worth noting, however.
1) Democrats generally feel strongly about addressing climate change as seen in the Highest Score category.
2) There are lots of discussions (not necessarily for or against) in regards to addressing climate change among Libertarians. Unlike r/Democrats, r/Libertarian may not feel as strongly about addressing climate change on the federal level.
r/Democrats
As noted above, Democrats generally feel strongly about climate change. To further analyze, what issues are they posting about in regards to this?
1) The following titles often mention government involvement in addressing saving the environment. It seems rather important for the government to be involved in addition to the average US citizen. Public figures such as Donald Trump, Michelle Obama, Greta Thunberg, and Bernie Sanders are mentioned.
2) In the Lowest Score, Lowest Upvote, and Least Comments categories, Jay Inslee among other politicians like Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden are mentioned. Does this mean that users of r/Democrats do not like these politicians as much as others? It can be difficult to say.
r/Republican
People may assume that Republicans don’t usually take the stance for the government to address climate change. However, a couple of post titles may suggest otherwise. The consensus seems somewhat divided. Is there a divide on how Republicans view climate change?
1) The 2020 coronavirus is mentioned a couple of times in post titles. One would think that the two aren’t connected, so what about the pandemic is linked to climate change?
2) In regards to quantitative analysis, it may be possible here to call on words that may link some post titles together as being against climate change involvement. These include “terrify” and “blame” in Highest Score, “threat” in Highest Upvote, “lies” (noun) in Lowest Score, and “skeptic” in Most Comments.
r/Libertarian
Unlike r/Democrats and r/Republican, it is more difficult to tell how Libertarians feel about climate change. Rather there is more debate and discussion on it. Libertarians may be more neutral when it comes to climate change and the environment.
1) There are several and questions and debates on climate change such as the post titles, “What’s the Libertarian answer to Climate Change?” and “/r/Libertarian Discussion Thread: Climate Change.” Perhaps some users aren’t sure how to feel about the issue. It’s much more clear in r/Democrats and r/Republican.
2) The right side of the table suggests that Libertarians may lean more towards addressing climate change and the environment. A post title in Lowest Score includes “9 Things You Need to Know About The Climate Change Hoax” and another title in “Lowest Upvote is “Ben Shapiro DESTROYS Greta’s CRAZY Climate Change Arguments.”
r/GreenParty
It should be no surprise that the Green Party’s all about addressing climate change and saving the environment as soon as possible and as efficiently as possible. Therefore, the discussion in r/GreenParty should lean more deeply into the actual issues surrounding it rather than whether users believe in it or not.
1) Fossil fuels, coal, and oil are mentioned in several post titles, primarily in the Highest Score. This implies that the focus of the Green Party in regards to climate change is addressing the concerns with fossil fuels and oil.
2) A couple of posts are more of a call to action, meaning it’s time people take action to fix climate change: “As Governments Fail to Act on Climate Change–The People Step Up to the Plate” and “Greens Call for Green Economy to Combat Climate Change.” The Green Party already wants to take action.
Final Thoughts and Limitations
This is by no means a finished analysis. The purpose of this exploratory analysis is to begin gaining some insight as to what each subreddit’s users talk about in concerns to the environment and climate change. With any analysis, some limitations come with collecting and exploring data that may inhibit the process or skew the results.
Limitations
1) The code written may unintentionally exclude posts that may talk about climate change and environment (plus associated keywords) even though those words are not included in the title. For example, a post talking about fossil fuels or going green may talk about climate change but does not mention “climate change” or “environment” in its post title.
2) Sometimes it can be difficult to decipher what the tone of the post is (or rather if the post is meant to be humorous vs serious). Additionally, there is the possibility of Internet trolls lurking in any of the subreddits, which can skew the data extracted. This could be fixed with some context from the comments but requires further extraction of comment data.
3) In the tables, it may be that the lowest post score/upvote ratio and least number of comments are newer posts and just haven’t been seen by many people yet. In other words, those posts don’t necessarily mean people don’t agree with that content.
4) In other cases, posts that happen to have an upvote ratio of 1 (100%) actually may be newer and have low post scores despite a high post upvote ratio because not many people have interacted with that post yet. Oftentimes posts with high scores don’t usually have upvote ratios of 1, but rather maybe somewhere in the 0.8–0.95 range.
5) In regards to a more deep analysis, there needs to be a way to quantify the results. This would include a more quantitative measure of whether a post is pro-/anti- environment, pro-/anti- government funding, etc. A way to specify certain words or tone will allow us to see if a post leans one way or another and obtain a concrete number of how people feel about climate change and the issues surrounding it.
Moving forward, it would be important to extract information about the post text and/or media (if applicable) as well as comments for further context. The discussion that follows an initial post can be just as crucial to answering the overall questions. So how do people in the different political party subreddits feel about climate change and the environment? And do we know if they think the federal government should do about it? The answer to the latter is still unclear. But the answer to the former we have some insight on.
The Democratic Party generally feels strongly about addressing climate change. However, they may not feel as strongly about it as much as the Green Party. The Green Party is known to primarily be a one-issue party, which is helping the environment. It is no surprise that they want to take action immediately and efficiently. Unlike Democrats, where they do agree with addressing the problem, the Green Party wants to make this the top priority. Libertarians feel less strongly about the issue but still, lean more towards the side of the Democrats/Green Party in this issue. There’s still some discussion to have about it there. Finally, Republicans do seem to lean more towards not addressing climate change and the environment, but perhaps some people feel differently about that.
As divided as the political parties are on the many existing political issues whether it’s gun control or higher taxes, there’s much to say about climate change. Perhaps people aren’t so much divided on the issue as they think they are.
