Polarization and conflict on air pollution regulation in five Germany cities

Air pollution is one of the biggest environmental threats and clean air is essential for human life and for the ecology. The WHO estimates 7 million premature deaths and the loss of millions of lives due to air pollution every year and recommended in September 2021 to set stricter limits. However, it is very difficult to protect the quality of the air. A fundamental conflict between health and environmental concerns on the one side, and economic interests on the other, is visible worldwide and crystallizes particularly at the local level. This conflict can be observed particularly well in the EU, where the automobile industry is the central pillar of economic success, but also environmental standards are especially high. In order to reduce air pollutant emissions, EU Directive 2008/50/EG has pushed city administrations to strengthen their commitment to environmental protection without large success. In 2018, the European Commission sued Germany (and other EU member states) for non-compliance with its regulations and the EU Court of Justice has found Germany guilty of systematically violating EU regulations. Cities must take effective measures in the revision of the air pollution control plans to comply with the limit values as soon as possible. An effective but very divisive measure are driving bans. These driving bans and other “hard” measures such as speed limits are, however, discussed very controversial. Moreover, other highly relevant arguments such as health concerns or issues of social inequalities are often not particularly well represented in the public debates. While German cities share this fundamental fault line of different interests, the actual major policy debate depend on the context of the cities, in particular whether the conflicts between automobile- and environment-affine actors are manifested or not. How polarized are the debates in the case study cities? Is the difference of implementing stricter measures in the cities and successful air quality control associated with the degree of discursive polarization? What are the dominant coalitions and how do they change over time? Which actors play a role for constructing the different discursive structure? Drawing on the ACF, we study policy processes and polarized conflicts on air pollution regulation in five Germany cities Munich, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Berlin and Dresden. The data source of our study is local newspaper article in each city between 2016 and 2021. We coded the actors and their arguments that appears in the articles with discourse network analyzer (DNA) (Leifeld 2016). Notably, identifying coalitions and the degree of polarization with DNA dataset with ensuring comparability across cases is methodologically challenging. Each case has a unique set of discourses and has a different number of dimensions of discursive conflicts. Previously, one of the authors of this paper proposed an approach called the Advocacy Coalition Index that enables coalition identification in a comparable manner with the one-mode network data (Satoh et al 2023). In this paper, we propose its extension for the two-mode network to address this challenge.