And the third speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Nayla Fawzi; she begins by noting that German society is not inherently polarised, but that certain debates – including climate change – serve as trigger points for polarisation. This does not necessarily question the existence of anthropogenic climate change as such, but certainly covers various preferences for whether and how to deal with it.
There are therefore also significant perceptions of polarisation on this topic in Germany; such perceived polarisation can be assessed by surveys of underlying feelings towards others’ positions, as compared to their actual positions. However, what is often ignored here are perceptions of the size of the differing opinion camps: these should also be taken into account in assessing perceived polarisation, e.g. by comparing them with actual membership sizes.
News media can have a significant impact on the public’s perception of the opinion climate, of course, and can lead to substantial overestimations of opinion differences in society; this is false polarisation. This can then also affect citizens’ own political opinions. Such perceived polarisation has often been studied only for the atrophied two-party system in the United States, however.
This project explored these patterns for Germany through a representative survey of some 2,500 participants in mid-2024; it asked about people’s own positioning on climate change, asked them to estimate perceived public opinion, and asked them to report on their own media use patterns.
52% of Germans are for and 21% against stricter climate mitigation measures; they assumed that 46% were for and 48% against such measures, however. This means that perceptions of polarisation on this issue were vastly higher than polarisation actually is within Germany society. Across individual participants, the vast number of them overestimated the polarisation of society, many of them very substantially.
This was influenced significantly by the use of commercial broadcasting and local media outlets; use of alternative news media led to lower misperceptions of polarisation, however, and this might be explained by the fact that those participants might have underestimated the pro-climate action position.
There will be further waves of this survey study, and this will enable further exploration of some of these patterns.
