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Abstract Research has demonstrated that members of the public recognize anomalous weather patterns, and that subjective perceptions of the weather are related to beliefs about the occurrence of climate change. Yet despite two decades of scholarship and dozens of studies, inconsistent and insufficient data have made it difficult to credibly identify the causal impact of objective experiences on perceptions, and the impact of perceptions on beliefs regarding climate change occurrence. Here, we overcome these limitations by collecting and analyzing data from a 5-y panel survey of 2,500 individuals in Oklahoma, a US state that is highly divided on questions about climate change. Our findings indicate that the relationship between local weather anomalies and climate change beliefs is heavily dependent on baseline beliefs about whether climate change was occurring. For people who did not believe in climate change in the initial survey in our series, perceptions of anomalously hot and dry seasons shifted their beliefs towards the occurrence of anthropogenic climate change, whereas their perceptions of anomalously cool and wet seasons shifted their beliefs away from anthropogenic climate change. This relationship was not present among people who believed that climate change was occurring at the beginning of the study; their perceptions of seasonal temperature and precipitation anomalies had no effect on their beliefs about climate change. These patterns have substantial implications for the evolution of public beliefs about climate change. 

We introduce a new way to measure interest group agendas and demonstrate an approach to extending the CAP topic coding scheme to policy domains at lower levels of analysis. We use public comments on regulatory proposals in US education policy to examine the topics contained in policy arguments. We map the education policy space using a data set of 493 comments and 5315 hand-coded comment paragraphs. A unique measurement model accounts for group and topic diversity and allows us to validate our approach. The findings have implications for measuring topic agendas in lower-level policy domains and understanding group coalitions and competition in education policy. We contribute to text-as-data approaches tracing policy change in the study of public policy. The findings suggest the relationship between issue attention observed by scholars and larger policy reform movements.