Wegener Center Common Space

Citizen participation as a Leverage Point: A comparative case study of the Austrian Climate Citizens‘ Assembly and the East-Belgian permanent Citizens‘ Dialogue – Lukas Baumgartner, Uni Graz

With institutional trust declining, the climate crisis accelerating and political polarization on the rise, democratic societies are facing a multitude of crises in the 21st century. Participatory democratic processes such as citizens’ councils may assist in facing these current challenges by fostering exchange between citizens, producing citizen-backed recommendations for policymakers and strengthening democratic system resilience. To evaluate the role of diCerent participatory processes in the broader democratic system, this thesis investigates the potential of participatory processes to act upon deep leverage points as postulated by Donella Meadows. In a comparative case study, seven semistructured interviews were conducted, three with participants from the Austrian Climate Citizens’ Assembly, three with participants of the East-Belgian permanent Citizens’ Dialogue and one with the administrative spokesperson of the East-Belgian permanent Citizens’ Dialogue. The results of the interviews were analysed through qualitative coding in MaxQDA and subsequently synthesized into three overarching categories: ‘Human agency’, ‘Mental model shifts through deliberation’ and ‘System responsiveness and Institutional trust’. These three categories connect to diCerent leverage points within democratic systems. Most notably, participatory processes show the potential to act upon usually hard-to-access deep leverage points, including: ‘The mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises’, ‘The goals of a system’, and ‘The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure’. Furthermore, the eCects of system structure and institutionalization on participant experiences were explored as the two processes diCer substantially in their organizational structure. While the East-Belgian permanent Citizens’ Dialogue is an institutionalized participatory process, the Austrian Climate Citizens’ Assembly was a one-oC event held in 2022. DiCerences in process structure mainly manifested in the handling of recommendations and general transparency throughout the process, which in turn directly influenced the perceived agency and institutional trust of participants. During the deliberation phase, system structure did not exert a significant eCect on participants’ experiences, as the eCects of deliberative discussions on mental models of participants were mostly similar in both cases. The findings suggest that, if transparency and organizational process design are well executed, participatory processes can help to facilitate broader societal change by acting upon deep leverage points.

Extreme Weather Events in Austrian and British Media. A comparative discourse analysis of major press outlets – Daniela Schweiger, Uni Graz

As climate change progresses, extreme weather events are becoming more frequent, with floods posing a serious threat especially to Europe. The key interest of this thesis is to analyse the portrayal of floods depending on different types of newspapers, as well as examining cultural and country-specific aspects. A critical discourse analysis approach was used to analyse newspaper publications on floods in Austrian and British broadsheets and tabloids. The broadsheet, Der Standard and the tabloid, Kronen Zeitung were examined for Austrian newspapers, while The Times, as a broadsheet and The Daily Mail as tabloid were analysed for British newspapers. The scope of the thesis considered publications in a one-month period following a flood in the respective country. All newspaper publications were subjected to a structural analysis scrutinizing key topics, whereas a smaller selected amount of articles were examined using a detailed content analysis to identify commonly-used frames.
The results demonstrate several country-specific but also type-specific differences as well as similarities in the newspapers. In Austrian newspapers, a greater extent of reporting focused on floods, especially in tabloids. The thesis found that in Austria, floods were also often discussed in the context of politics. In British newspapers however, the weather itself was one of the most common topics in combination with floods. Depending on the newspaper or country of publication, different frames or linguistic aspects are used to report on floods. This thesis also shows the tabloidization of broadsheets in British media, meaning that broadsheets increasingly use the framework typically used in tabloids. In Austria, however, the differences in framing extreme weather events between the tabloid and the broadsheet remain distinct. These cultural and newspaper-specific differences must be taken into account in the discourse of extreme weather events in media as they shape the public’s perception of the climate crisis and highlight the importance of climate communication.

Moderation: Laurenzo Silvestri