From controversy to common ground

Abstract

Once a concept of the radical environmentalist movement, the term sustainability was incorporated into the hegemonic discourse. Prior research argues that this occurred through a process in which the original controversy between ecological and economic issues has evolved from an antagonist opposition to a broad concurrence. While this development has mainly been analysed qualitatively, we apply quantitative analysis of mass media in Austria between 1990 and 2020 to trace the changing use of the term. Applying methods of corpus linguistics, topic modelling, and dictionary based analysis, we find that the discourse has become less polarized over time, deploying increasingly positive language, and catering more and more towards the conservative parts of the population. Political actors’ presence declines significantly after 2000, and simultaneously, commercial and individual solutions are more widely discussed – everyone is responsible, and no one is to blame.