Assessing the mobilization potential of environmental advocacy communication

Abstract

Environmental organizations use a variety of text based communication formats to mobilize supporters to take collective action on their behalf. Yet we know little about the characteristics of collective action communication used by environmental organizations, nor its mobilization potential. In this paper we investigate whether environmental organizations' website communication reflects variables focal to the Social Identity Model of Collective Action that are known to motivate intentions to engage in collective action: identity, negative emotions, and efficacy. We use Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) text analysis software to investigate the extent to which linguistic cues associated with these focal variables are communicated in text obtained from 497 environmental advocacy organizations' websites. Findings demonstrate that environmental groups use identity and efficacy language more than the LIWC comparison text corpus, but show consistently low usage of both negative and positive emotion language. Our analyses also suggest that groups with the greatest financial resources use identity and efficacy language more frequently than groups with fewer financial resources. We suggest that future research investigating the effects of linguistic cues on message receivers is an important next step for both advancing the SIMCA framework as well as assisting environmental organizations’ ability to more effectively mobilize supporters through text based communication formats.