ABSTRACT

Environmental disasters generate uncertainty, which is a crucial element of post-disaster political dynamics. Does communication of uncertainty affect public willingness to participate in political activism? This article first provides a content analysis of news coverage to show that uncertainty framing is prevalent in the aftermath of environmental disasters. The article then examines the effect of such uncertainty on public willingness to protest, presenting a survey experiment of over 3,600 Americans recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk. In theory, uncertainty framing may trigger emotions like anxiety, which reduce people’s willingness to engage in protest. Since in environmental communication uncertainty frames are often used to reify the status quo, which is more easily compatible with conservative beliefs, the dampening effect should be stronger among those who are ideologically conservative. Our experiment confirms the latter expectation but does not find support for the former. These results help explain why some protest coalitions may have more breadth than others after environmental disasters.

摘要

环境灾难会产生不确定性，这是灾后政治动态的一个关键因素。不确定性的沟通会影响公众参与政治活动的意愿吗？本文首先对新闻报道进行内容分析，以表明不确定性框架在环境灾难后普遍存在。然后，这篇文章研究了这种不确定性对公众抗议意愿的影响，并展示了一项对通过 Amazon Mechanical Turk 招募的 3,600 多名美国人进行的调查实验。从理论上讲，不确定性框架可能会引发焦虑等情绪，从而降低人们参与抗议的意愿。由于在环境交流中，不确定性框架经常被用来具体化现状，这更容易与保守的信念兼容，在思想保守的人中，抑制作用应该更强。我们的实验证实了后者的期望，但没有找到对前者的支持。这些结果有助于解释为什么一些抗议联盟在环境灾难后可能比其他联盟更广泛。