Title of Dissertation: national renewable energy policy

Table 11. 
Number of samples by newspaper. 
Newspaper 
All articles
 
Samples 
Articles 
Statements 
USA Today
 
19 
3 
5 
Wall Street Journal 
 
192 
44 
92 
New York Times
 
184 
48 
84 
Los Angeles Times
 
20 
6 
12 
New York Post
 
1 
- 
- 
The Washington Post
 
153 
22 
38 
New York Daily News
 
3 
- 
- 
Total
 
572 
123 
231 
Each article was reviewed to assess whether it was related to the topic—the trade 
dispute on solar panels between the U.S. and China—or if it only includes the search 
terms. Even if an article was closely related to the topic, it was excluded if it did not 
include any claim of an actor on the solar panel trade issue. Through this screening 
procedure, 123 articles were selected as samples.
An entire article was not appropriate for the unit of analysis for this study because 

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a single article includes multiple claims from various speakers. Therefore, each claim 
from an actor was given a code as a statement. If a statement was from a representative of 
an organization, the organization was regarded as a speaker. As for a Congressperson or 
an expert, an individual was coded as a speaker. The selected newspaper articles included 
231 statements. 
Analysis of newspaper articles could introduce a selection bias since not all actors 
release their claims. Moreover, some actors show their claims but remain anonymous. 
However, this does not critically weaken the validity of this study since being invisible or 
anonymous mean that they are less active in initiating change. As this study focuses on 
dominant actors rather than less active actors, newspaper articles can be effectively used.
The variables include organization and four issue categories. The organization of 
each statement is classified into 13 categories: U.S. state actors, China state actors, State 
actors in other countries, U.S. solar panel manufacturers, China solar panel 
manufacturers, Solar panel manufacturers in other countries, U.S. solar corporations other 
than panel manufacturers, Chinese solar corporations other than panel manufacturers, 
solar corporations other than panel manufacturers in other countries, U.S. industry 
association, China industry association, and experts (Table 12). 

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