# Polarization of Climate Politics Results from Partisan Sorting: Evidence from Finnish Twittersphere

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.02706 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02706/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jul 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Evolving linguistic divergence on polarizing social media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01659/) (2023)
- [Understanding Opinions Towards Climate Change on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01217/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Prior research shows that public opinion on climate politics sorts along partisan lines. However, they leave open the question of whether climate politics and other politically salient issues exhibit tendencies for issue alignment, which the political polarization literature identifies as among the most deleterious aspects of polarization. Using a network approach and social media data from the Twitter platform, we study polarization of public opinion toward climate politics and ten other politically salient topics during the 2019 Finnish elections as the emergence of opposing groups in a public forum. We find that while climate politics is not particularly polarized compared to the other topics, it is subject to partisan sorting and issue alignment within the universalist-communitarian dimension of European politics that arose following the growth of right-wing populism. Notably, climate politics is consistently aligned with the immigration issue, and temporal trends indicate that this phenomenon will likely persist.