The “green wave” in the EU Twittersphere during the May 2019 election campaign

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the impact of the increased attention to climate issues as expressed in civil society mobilisations in the winter and spring 2019 in the hashtags that were used to discuss the 2019 European Parliament campaign in Twitter. The paper combines quantitative and qualitative methods – network analysis and hashtag framing analysis – to analyse the emergence and circulation of climate-related hashtags in the 120.000 tweets collected during the campaign. The results indicate that environment-related tweets are much more transnational albeit being decentralised than any other subjects, confirming the success of Green activism in Twitter and their ability to impact election agendas. This contrasts with the limited impact of institutional campaigns and suggests that transnational issues can compete for attention with polity contestation issues (Brexit, voting denial). Our results support ideas that Twitter debates can contribute to the policy-centred rather than polity contestation debates, although they also must be interpreted against the background of the exceptional electoral context of 2019.