When does controversy discourse correspond to visitor demand? Discursive political consumerism in cultural tourism

Online controversy discourse around cultural institutions is increasingly visible, yet whether such discourse corresponds to measurable variation in visitor demand remains unclear. This study examines how controversy-discourse frames correspond to visitor demand at the British Museum across two sustained controversies that differ in the degree and locus of institutional actionability: fossil-fuel sponsorship and contested cultural artefacts. Drawing on discursive political consumerism and the moral economy of visiting, we construct engagement-weighted controversy-discourse signals from 2.14 million posts across six major London cultural institutions and link them to weekly British Museum arrivals and monthly attendance for all six institutions. A monthly fixed-effects panel provides the main estimates, complemented by supplementary weekly analyses. At the British Museum, fossil-fuel sponsorship discourse is positively associated with aggregate institutional attendance, whereas contested-artefact discourse is negatively associated but more specification-sensitive. Because the two signals overlap, the frame-specific interpretation remains tentative. Weekly models do not detect a robust short-run arrivals response. The study advances political-consumerism research in cultural tourism by providing a human-validated, frame-differentiated account of associations between public controversy discourse and aggregate institutional attendance. For heritage managers, the findings support assessing controversy discourse alongside attendance, visitor feedback and the institution’s capacity to address sponsorship or restitution claims.