DNA Procedure

The DNA in this thesis is performed in ve steps: (1) selecting the cases, (2) selecting the newspapers, (3) collecting the articles, (4) developing a code book, and (5) coding the articles. Since step (1), the case selection, is relevant for the DNA as well as for the survey study, it was already described in subsection 5.1. Thus in the following, the steps (2) to (5) will be described.

Newspaper selection. In order to identify specics of local discourses, it is necessary to study newspapers which cover local aspects of the energy transition, local policy dis-courses and local events. While Germany has a huge variety of daily newspapers, generally only one or two newspapers per region are reporting in regional sections about local cir-cumstances and events. Thus, for every one of the four cases the largest newspaper with a regional section for the county was selected. In all cases, the selected newspapers are the most present in the discourse, reaching by far the most readers. In both counties of BW, no other newspaper is reporting about local circumstances, making the given newspapers the number one written source for analysis. Both counties inNRW are highly populated and more newspapers are present. However, the two newspapers chosen have by far the most readers and thus their covering is very important within the local media discourse.

Other frequently used criteria like the quality press criterion (Leifeld, 2011; Barranco and Wisler, 1999, 165) are dicult to apply to the local context, where the number of newspapers reporting on local issues is limited, and biases on the political spectrum of newspapers are less known than at the national level (for biases in newspaper reporting see for exampleEarl et al., 2004; Ortiz et al., 2005; Woolley, 2000). For further research it would be very desirable to expand the amount and type of documents analyzed. Yet, within the scope of this work, analyzing the four major newspapers seems to be a reason-able procedure.

Article collection. All four newspapers were searched by the phrase Energiewende (en-ergy transition) and county name, as for example for theADK, the newspaper

Südwest-Table 5.4: Coded Articles by County

Alb-Donau-Kreis Bodenseekreis Hagen Bonn Total

Total # of Articles 167 138 128 217 650

# Articles analyzed 142 138 128 145 553

Presse was searched for the term Energiewende AND Alb-Donau-Kreis. The articles from the Südwest-Presse, Südkurier and Bonner General-Anzeiger were obtained through the newspaper archive wiso (wiso,2014). The search within the newspaper Westfalenpost was conducted within the newspapers own archive (Westfalenpost, 2014). The amount of articles found by this search are listed in table5.4, due to time constrains not all articles were coded. Therefore, in the case of ADK and BN articles were sampled proportionally to their monthly frequency. Save-the-date-notices and letters to the editor were excluded from the analysis. Since the coding of the articles was done in October 2014, the article search was limited to all articles published prior to September 30th 2014. No starting date for the search was set.

Code book development. For this analysis, a combination of a deductive and induc-tive approach for the development of categories was applied. This approach is preferred by most DNA researchers (see for example Leifeld, 2011, 160f. and Nagel, 2016, 117f.).

Therefore, the initial categories were derived from the literature on the German energy transition (see section 2.4) and the policy literature on local energy policy-making (see section 3.1). The literature emphasizes the importance of civic attitudes towards and civic participation within the transition. Furthermore, political and economic aspects are identied as important drivers for the local energy transition. During the coding, two categories were added inductively which did not gain much attention within the literature review: the ecological and the technological category. This leads to ve major argumenta-tive categories: civic, ecological, economic, political and technological arguments. In order to obtain a more ne-grained code book, a sample of 100 articles was coded, and rened categories were determined inductively during the coding process. This procedure leads to a code book consisting of the ve macro-categories: Civil society, Ecology, Economy, Policy and Politics, and Technology, which are rened in 71 meso-categories, and further into 101 micro-categories.²⁷ The code book was then utilized to code all the 553 articles.

Coding procedure. Thus, allowing to verify the hypotheses, whether dierence in dis-courses and network structures are present due to varying preconditions, and how they aect the outcome.

After the articles are added to the program, statements are identied within the text. A statement is hereby dened as a text portion in which a spokesperson (or an organization) can be clearly identied, and the spokesperson utters his or her beliefs, interpretations,

27The full code book is provided in the supplementary material.

Dezember 2007 März 2008 Juni 2008 September 2008 Dezember 2008 März 2009 Juni 2009 September 2009 Dezember 2009 März 2010 Juni 2010 September 2010 Dezember 2010 März 2011 Juni 2011 September 2011 Dezember 2011 März 2012 Juni 2012 September 2012 Dezember 2012 März 2013 Juni 2013 September 2013 Dezember 2013 März 2014 Juni 2014 0

5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40

Number of Statements

Figure 5.7: Total Number of Statements on the Energy Transition

images or solution concepts in a positive or in a negative way (Leifeld,2011, 77). Hereby only statements where coded that relate to the (local) energy transition. The statement is then highlighted, which leads the program to add a tab to the statement. Every statement consists of ve parameters (Leifeld,2011, 77f.): the speaker, the aliated organization, the referred category, a dummy variable indicating agreement to the category (agreement or disagreement), and the time point when the statement was made (this is generalized by the publishing date of the article). An example for a relevant statement is the following quotation: The Economic minister of NRW, Garrelt Duin, states that modern generation plants will be necessary to complement the renewable energies. In the given example the person would be Garrelt Duin, the organization is the Ministry of Economy of NRW.

The statement made belongs to the category Tech - base load supply needed and agree-ment to this category can be recorded. Altogether 1733 stateagree-ments were coded, being issued by 512 individuals within 226 dierent organizations.

5.3.2 Data

Figure 5.7 shows the timely distribution of all statements. Although no starting date was set, very few statements about the energy transition were made before 2007. Thus,

a₁

a₂ a₃

a₄

a₅

c₁

c₃

c₂

c₄

c₅

Affiliation network Actor co-occurrence

network

Category co-occurrence network

Actors Concept

Figure 5.8: Schematic Illustration of the Discourse Network Model (own visualization adopted from Leifeld, 2011, 82)

they are neglected in this visualization. An early spike in statements can be observed in the fall of October 2010, which can be explained by the then made decision of the new government, to prolong the life spans of the existing nuclear power plants (BMWi, 2010). The gure shows that the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima (in March 2011), and the governmental decisions that followed in Germany, led to a signicant increase in statements made concerning the energy transition.²⁸ Leifeld (2011, 90) points out that discourses are always embedded in a context, and meanings of discourse concepts may thus change over time. Since only 3.4% of the total number of statements were made until the 30^th of September 2010 (over a time span of three years), only statements are considered that were made since October 2010.

The raw data after coding is a data frame, in which every statement is represented in one row. Every row consists of the text portion that was marked, the speaker, the organization, the category, the agreement, and the time point. This raw data can then be visualized in an aliation network in which each actor (either a speaker or an organization) is connected to the categories they refer to. Those relations are visualized as the dashed lines in gure 5.8. As described and formalized in section 5.2, and visualized in gure 5.8, co-occurrence networks of actors or concepts can be drawn based on these aliation

28Hereby, the article selection procedure has to be kept in mind, by which only articles using the term

`energy transition' where selected, while earlier articles might have referred to more specic aspects such as `REs' or `energy eciency' instead of the umbrella term `energy transition'.

networks. Within an actor co-occurrence network, two actors are connected if they agree (or both disagree) on the same concepts. And asLeifeld(2011, 81) puts it, [. . . ] the more concepts two actors agree (or both disagree) on, the more similar they are in terms of preferences or concepts in the discourse, and the more likely they are to belong to the same discourse coalition or advocacy coalition. Therefore, theDNAallows to empirically determine discourse and advocacy coalition structures, based on the clusters within the actor co-occurrence networks (Leifeld, 2011, 82).

Concept co-occurrence networks deliver information on the relation of concepts within the discourse. The more actors refer to two concepts, the more likely those two concepts belong to the same story line or narrative.