Title: Public discourse and political discourse around the Endangered Species Act (ESA): How public opinion, media framing, and institutional decision making interact to shape conservation policy outcomes.

Presented by Agnes Namyalo, Computing PhD student, Data Science emphasis

Abstract

Wildlife conservation remains a critical global issue due to increasing biodiversity loss and human pressures on natural habitats. Despite recognition of the importance of wildlife conservation, many conservation activities are politically contentious. Individual values, deeply held beliefs regarding appropriate behaviors, and desirable outcomes, may play a role in these policy conflicts. At the same time, increasing polarization and partisanship surrounding environmental issues suggest that Wildlife conservation may be a proxy for broader political battles.

The role of the media, as a conduit of information between people and their elected officials in contributing to or diffusing these policy conflicts is unknown. This paper reviews a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods offering an investigation on public attitudes and policy controversies surrounding media narratives that amplify controversy despite consistently strong public support about the Endangered Species Act (ESA). We then explore emerging computational methods, specifically Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, for topic modeling, to evaluate how advanced text-analysis tools can uncover patterns in media framing about wildlife conservation.

Finally, we outline key open problems, including the difficulty of determining how values, media, and policy influence one another over time, the lack of consistent time series data to clarify these relationships, and the need for advanced methods such as NLP to track these dynamics.

Advisor: Dr. Matt Williamson

Committee Members: Dr. Francesca Spezzano, Dr. Chris Birdsall

External Examiner: Dr. Edoardo Serra