Political parties and climate policy

Abstract

This study presents an innovative approach to hand-coding parties’ policy preferences in the relatively new, cross-sectoral field of climate change mitigation policy. It applies this approach to party manifestos in six countries, comparing the preferences of parties in Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy and the United Kingdom over the past two decades. It probes the data for evidence of validity through content validation and convergent/discriminant validation and engages with the debate on position-taking in environmental policy by developing a positional measure that incorporates ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ climate policy preferences. The analysis provides evidence for the validity of the new measures, shows that they are distinct from comparable measures of environmental policy preferences and argues that they are more comprehensive than existing climate policy measures. The new measures strengthen the basis for answering questions that are central to climate politics and to party politics. The approach developed here has important implications for the study of new, complex or cross-cutting policy issues and issues that include both valence and positional aspects.

Policy Characteristics, Electoral Cycles, and the Partisan Politics of Climate Change

“…Thus, existing policy preferences associated with traditional left-right politics may induce left governments to become more active in climate policy making than other governments (Båtstrand 2014;Ladrech and Little 2019). Finally, research suggests that climate policy involves more positional disagreement and stronger alignment with the left-right dimension than does environmental policy more generally, the latter arguably being closer to a valence issue (Carter et al 2018;Farstad 2018). If this is the case, we can also expect that left-right differences are more likely to manifest in climate policy making.…”

The Global Environment Facility and Latin American Countries

“…Academic research on political parties and their stances toward the environment is abundant and provides strong empirical evidence pointing that left-wing political actors are prone to hold favorable attitudes on the topic. Different studies on political manifestos and leaders' statements consistently show this relation (Carter 2013;Carter et al 2017;Farstad 2017;Neumayer 2004). In terms of environmental performance, scholars have also found evidence that left-wing governments in the developed world are greener than their right-wing counterparts, regarding, for example, air pollution or national climate policies (Neumayer 2003;Tobin 2017).…”

Fractionalized but ambitious? Voting on energy and climate policy in the European Parliament

“…A final group of expectations regarding MEPs' voting behaviour focuses on policy positions of parties (Carter et al, 2018). Much of the recently emerging literature on populist parties and climate change policies shows that right-wing populist parties are particularly prone to oppose EU ECP (Schaller & Carius, 2019; see also Huber et al, 2021;Petri & Biedenkopf, 2021).…”