How do U.S. politicians communicate about climate change on X? Examining discourses of delay and action

Conservative denial and delay of climate action are well established by extensive scholarship (McCright and Dunlap, Glob Environ Change 21(4):1163–1172, 2011; Dunlap and Brulle, Res Handb Commun Clim Change 49–61, 2020; Gounaridis and Newell, Sci Rep 14(1):297, 2024), but there is limited understanding of the discursive strategies deployed within public-facing communications on the part of U.S. politicians, regardless of political orientation. Our study addresses this gap in the literature by operationalizing and building upon Lamb et al.’s (Glob Sustain 3:e17 2020) expert-elicited discourses of delay typology and developing a discourses of action typology. Using a mixed methods approach, we apply this comprehensive framework to a dataset covering public communications by U.S. members of Congress on X during January – December 2021, a period coinciding with extreme climatic impacts, climate policy action under the Biden administration, and high levels of engagement with political discourse by the U.S. public more generally. Importantly, our study both builds on existing literature and adds a novel contribution by deductively and inductively identifying and analyzing discourses of climate action. We collected posts from the X handles of members of the 117th U.S. Congress. After scraping all X posts by politicians across the House of Representatives and the Senate who had an official X handle, we systematically identified posts directly addressing climate change using established search terms. Drawing from this subset of posts directly relevant to climate change (N = 13,556), we analyzed a total of 21% of the dataset (n = 2,844) through a multi-step analysis. Our in-depth qualitative analysis is complemented by a quantitative multivariate analysis to predict the likelihood of discourses of action or delay across a variety of politician characteristics.