Leaders ’ ‘ Green ’ Posts
in addition to gender and age , also higher levels of GDP and EPI are associated with statistically significant values . To be more specific , a higher propensity of focusing on environmental issues is correlated with higher levels of GDP and EPI .
Conclusions
The comparative analysis on the Facebook pages of the main political leaders carried out in this article returned some interesting findings with relevant theoretical implications . Our research indicated that environmental issues are not prioritized in the agendas of the 127 leaders taken into consideration . In line with the empirical analyses highlighting the role of media in shaping the salience of such issues among the general public ( for example , see Cook et al . 1983 ; McCombs and Shaw 1972 ; Roberts , Wanta , and Dzwo 2002 ; Wanta , Golan , and Cheolhan 2004 ), our study showed that citizens following the main political leaders of contemporary democracies on Facebook would only find that 2 out of 100 posts touched upon environmental issues . Hence , our analysis points out that , despite its potential , Facebook is not used by political leaders as a tool to spread information on environmental issues .
Nevertheless , the question remains whether this is indeed unexpected . In line with studies focusing on the low salience of environmental policies in national campaigns ( for example , see Dunlap 1987 and Dunlap 1991 on US electoral campaigns ), our analysis identified a prioritization of social and economic policies in more than 50 % of posts where leaders had included an explicit reference to these policy issues . We then found that the highest percentage of shared posts was associated with messages where leaders talked about health and school systems , or about the financial or labor sectors .
Analyzing the relationship between our theoretical framework and the Facebook data , the resulting findings show interesting patterns . While the Facebook posts under consideration confirm that left-wing and young leaders are more inclined to use Facebook to spread information about environmental issues , our hypothesis on the economic well-being of a country has been confirmed only in regard to Western countries . In particular , our findings show that high GDP levels are directly associated with the presence of environmental posts only when looking at the main leaders of Western Europe , USA , Canada , Australia , and New Zealand . Contrariwise , for Latin American countries , the presence of environmental posts is independent from the GDP levels . Moreover , rejecting our hypothesis on environmental quality , Facebook data reveal that leaders of countries with higher levels of environmental quality are showing a stronger focus on environmental issues . Furthermore , the findings do not support our hypothesis on the 2007 economic crisis . Data do not display a strong correlation between the effects of the crisis and the salience attached to environmental issues by political leaders
The most interesting consideration that can be drawn from our analysis concerns an existing distinction between leaders of Western and Latin American countries . As Table 5 pointed out , when jointly analyzing the 89 leaders included in our data set , there is no significant difference between Western and Latin American leaders ( t = 1.327 ; p = 0.188 ). However , relevant differences arise when these two clusters are analyzed separately . As our data show ,
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