European Policy Analysis
while a relationship between the hypotheses on economic well-being , environmental quality , socio-demographic characteristics , and leaders ’ party affiliation is clearly confirmed or rejected when analyzing the leaders of Western Europe , USA , Canada , Australia , and New Zealand , associations between these intervening variables and leaders ’ environmental salience are less distinct when we analyze Latin American leaders whose environmental focus appears more randomly influenced .
It goes without saying that considering the novelty of our analysis in the use of social media such as Facebook to understand policy orientations of political leaders , the study must inevitably be considered preliminary and there clearly is still room to further improve the explanations of our results . Nevertheless , by examining how specific variables relate to each other , this comparative analysis has had the strength of combining and testing together hypotheses from environmental policy and agenda-setting strands of literature . It did so by focusing on a media environment , Facebook , where no scholar had ever researched whether the main political leaders of contemporary advanced industrial democracies use social media for spreading information about environmental issues .
The relevance of Facebook in the contemporary media environment and all the dynamics resulting from the advent of a hybrid media system ( Chadwick 2013 ) implicate an in-depth understanding on how this specific social medium is affecting agenda-setting developments . This comparative research did so in a rather indirect way by showing how important it is to talk about environmental issues for contemporary leaders . Further research should analyze whether , and to what extent , posting on Facebook one ’ s own stance about water policies , waste policies , or the global warming issue is able to alter the environmental agendas of other media , political opponents , and citizens . More generally , it is also worth noting that this comparative study opens up new paths of research for the analysis of how political elites communicate after the digital revolution ( Ceccobelli 2015 ). Since we live in a media environment where around 1.65 billion of users connect to Facebook at least once a month , the communicative choices made by politicians on this platform represent a relevant measure for decoding the salience of a given policy , far more reliably than party manifestos . These quickly become outdated in a political time characterized by rapid changes both at political , economic , social , and technological level ; from this perspective , simply following political leaders ’ Facebook pages allows one to track the policy salience , developments , and dynamics with far greater accuracy ; this is ever more true since we live in an era of personalized politics ( Garzia 2014 ; Karvonen 2010 ; McAllister 2007 ).
Finally , it is worth mentioning that the focus on individual motivations of political leaders for environmental salience ( such as an in-depth analysis of outlier cases such as Marina Silva , or two British right-wing leaders who published more Facebook posts about environmental issues than their leftwing counterparts ) falls beyond the scope of this paper . Further research designed with the aim of establishing causality in the relationships highlighted in this analysis is in order and will mark the next step in better determining the role social media such as Facebook play in spreading information about the environment .
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