Stipend application for planned stay in residence at Stanford Universty, january-june 2017

My Ph. D. project researches the dynamics of opinion formation, focusing on three political fields of issue: climate change, immigration and welfare. As regards the issue of climate change, the anticipations are that citizens will have less stable opinions within a multi-party system as it is an issue field characterized by crossing the traditional left-right party cleavage structure. Moreover, the effect of opinion leadership is expected to be particularly important as it is a political issue field characterized by great complexity; both with regards to causes as well as proposed solutions. Thus, the project aims to increase our knowledge about how the public discourse on climate change is popularly perceived and how this affects citizens' opinions on different measures in the transformation towards a low-emission society. Within all democratic societies, public support is a prerequisite for policy, and as such a broader understanding of public opinion formation on climate change is an important step to enable efficient realizations of central goals in climate politics. Given the high quality data in my project, the connection to DIGSSCORE, and the broader Climate Research cluster at UiB, my project is entrenched within the research front in Norway when it comes to social science research on public opinion and the climate.As such, I have the best possibilities of making original contributions, and to build a career around this field of research. At the same time, I have a valuable network that Stanford faculty would benefit from getting to know. As some seeds for increased institutional cooperation have already been sown with DIGSSCORE, me spending a semester as Visiting Scholar at Stanford will undoubtedly help to further anchor these cooperative endeavours institutionally.