Who Are They?

Demographic Factors that Affect
Politicians' Attitudes

How does one politician’s background influence his/her decisions, typically on climate related issues? We chose party affiliation, nationality, gender, ethnic group, occupation, religion, age and academic degree as possible factors to figure out how do demorgraphics affect politicians’attitude.

Overview of demorgraphics distribution

We performed a preliminary analysis to calculate and compare the negative rate of each category that speakers in each attribute (party, nationality, gender, ethnic group, occupation, religion, highest degree and age) falls into.

Party We can see that there are about 1300 different parties. Most of the quotations come from Democratic Party (35%) and Republican Party (17%) in the U.S. Similarly, male american politicians dominate our dataset.Apart from them, Labor party( both in UK and Australia) also accounts for certain proportion.

Nationality It’s not surprising that American politicians are quoted most and some other English-speaking countries follow, since the dataset is mainly extracted from English articles. These countries also have strong influence on international affairs.

Degree Most of the speakers (with no missing value of ‘degree’) hold a doctoral degree.It appears Well-educated people tends to be active in this field.

Age The majority of speakers are between the age 35~65, which is consistent with adult’s propotion in politicians.Young people may be lack of discourse power.

Gender Males are dominant with more than 80% proportion, which reflects a clear gender bias.

Ethnic Group African americans are surprisingly active in the climate activities.

Occupation Politicians still accounts for a large proportion of all occupations.

Religion Catholicism is overwhelming among all religions.

According to the preliminary analysis, it seems that there is no significant attitudes difference towards climate change between different parties, countries,genders or education. However, we can tell from the figure that certain ethnic groups (religion related) tend to react negatively towards climate change issue. Also, the negative attitude seems to be more prevalent among journalists. At last,the older people get, the more they are inclined to climate denialism.
Since confounders will absolutely affect the conclusions that we made about groups of people, we chose a more rigorous way to explore causality —- A matched observational study : Inverse propensity score weight(IPTW).

Causality Analysis

Due to limit of covariat numbers, we selected occupation,gender,age and nationality for the causality analysis. Additionally,in the attributes, top 5 occupation and top 10 nationality are selected to avoid the imbalance between the control and treatment groups.

Occupation The score difference between the politician and non-politician is largest, which reaches to 0.113. This means being a politician tends to have more positive attitude towards the climate change issues,while being a writer has a more negative effect.

Age Elderly may be not as positive as adults on climate change.

Gender Males are inclined to have more positive attitudes towards climate issue.

Nationality People from India,South Afric and France tend to have more negative attitude, while German prove to be more positive.

From the analysis above, we know the major categories of each attribute (e.g. Democratic Party and Republican Party are two major categories in party). Thus, major categories are extracted. Here are the brief comparison of four chosen categories.