PhD thesis defence by Jessica Lang
How do social movement organisations achieve the societal changes they seek? In my dissertation, I propose that studying social movements through a discursive lens can enrich our understanding of processes of influence. Using the case of Switzerland from 1974 to 2024, I illustrate how social movement organisations shaped the discursive field around environmental issues, swaying public opinion and political behaviour in their favour. I begin by outlining how this discursive field has evolved over the past 50 years, revealing that dynamics between the federal and parliamentary discourses, along with media coverage of collective action events, fostered discursive shifts. These changes positively affected the policy preferences and electoral behaviour of individuals. I then substantiate these findings and test two different processes to explain how the recent mobilisation for climate justice shaped the 2019 parliamentary election. While citizens appeared unaffected by whether their constituency experienced protest events, I find that media attention to the organisation Climate Strike Switzerland and to climate change in general increased the vote shares of the Green Party and the Green Liberal Party. This finding demonstrates that social movements can benefit political parties beyond those that share similar ideological views. Furthermore, it is unexpected given that journalists are commonly found to denounce protest events. I address this puzzle by analysing journalistic meaning-making of disruptive protest events against the Gotthard Road Tunnel. Contrary to the literature, Swiss newspapers tended to sympathise with the concerns of the disruptors. However, journalists also reinforced negative stereotypes stemming from the social position of the disruptors and reported more intensely when the protest events targeted the causes of climate change. I propose that gendered understandings of the human-nature relationship result in the commodification of non-human nature and the cultural valorisation of mobility practices, eventually leading the media to perceive environmental degradation as an inevitable byproduct of modernisation.
Jessica Lang is a PhD researcher at the European University Institute. Before joining the EUI, Jessica obtained her master’s degree in Political Science from the University of Zurich. In her PhD project, she assesses the capacity of social movement organisations to influence the discursive field around the environment and examines how and why these discursive shifts affect public opinion and political behaviour. Starting in February 2026, Jessica will join the University of Zurich as a postdoctoral researcher, where she’ll explore human-nature value orientations surrounding Alpine infrastructure projects and assess how dimensions of justice influence this relationship.
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