Contribution (1): Who Said it First? Transnational and Translingual Agenda Diffusion in the Global Climate Change Debate

internet has facilitated the mobilization efforts of social movements and increased their transnational reach (Van Laer & Van Aelst, 2010). The communication patterns resulting from their “connective” alliances (Bennett & Sergerberg, 2013) intersect with those of a “hybrid media system” (Chadwick, 2013) and help shape the flow of information in “digital political communication ecologies” that are no longer coterminous with geographic or linguistic boundaries. How topics and frames are disseminated in these complex transnational digital networks is an important question. In this paper, we therefore extend the focus of existing research, which is largely restricted to single national and monolingual settings. Against the background of the global climate change debate, we investigate (a) how differently configured national issue contexts are tied together and how they shape transnational and translingual agenda diffusion processes. Focusing on the mobilisation and counter-mobilisation dynamics of the debate between climate advocates and climate sceptics, we (b) examine to what degree agenda dissemination occurs within the camps and how strongly it cuts across them. Finally, we assess (c) the role of the media in these networked issue publics and whether their gatekeeping monopoly is challenged by other actors. Our analysis is based on a longitudinal set of Web crawls that span 30 months. We take German civil society actors as starting points, as their increased access to public communication through the digital transformation has had some of the most disruptive effects on the emerging digital political communication ecologies (Bennett & Pfetsch, 2018). At the same time, the crawls remain open with regard to the country, the type (civil society, media, political or economic), and the language of those actors that become part of these hyperlink networks. Focusing on German and English, we then translate the crawled webpages to German and run structural topic models (Robets et al., 2013) on the corpus to identify the topic distribution for each actor and hence their climate agenda. From these topic-actor relationships we generate discourse networks between actors as nodes, where the ties represent a similar emphasis on a common topic. We then use temporal exponential random graph models (Cranmer & Desmarais, 2011) to analyse the dynamics of the topic dissemination processes in these networks and answer our research questions. The results of our analysis contribute to expanding our understanding of political communication in the digital age by making transnational and translinguistic agenda diffusion processes (Kim & Lee, 2006) central to the analysis. Methodologically, we integrate different computational approaches to capture the dynamics that govern digital agenda dissemination processes. Finally, the analysis of the actor-agenda networks allows us to substantially expand and reinterpret qualitative concepts of digital discourse relationships such as that of “networked gatekeeping and framing” (Meraz & Papcharissi, 2013) from a quantitative, computational angle.