What explains variation in parties’ climate change salience?

Abstract

The article explains the variation of climate change salience in party manifestos, examining the effects of party characteristics. Creating a novel measure of parties’ climate change salience based on Comparative Manifesto Project data, the article finds that parties have broadly not made climate change a salient issue, though significant differences remain. Left–right ideology significantly helps explain these differences and is more important than any other party characteristic in explaining the variation. This underlines the importance of ideology over economic and policy preferences, size and strategic incentives and incumbency constraints and points towards the partisan (as opposed to the valence) nature of the climate change issue. These results contrast to those of an identical analysis of environmental salience where ideology is found to have no effect, underlining how the two issues should be treated differently and lending further support to the argument that climate change is not a valence issue.

Keywords

climate change content analysis environment political parties valence

Introduction

As the recent Paris Agreement demonstrated, there is still large variation between developed states’ ambitions on climate change, despite them having agreed to ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ to address the issue (UNFCCC, 1992). Understanding this variation in state behaviour is ‘one of the great puzzles of comparative climate policy that can shed light on the possibilities and limits of political transformation towards a decarbonized world’ (Eckersley, 2013: 382–396). Often missing from the comparative climate policy literature, however, is a focus on the role of political parties. Political parties are at the heart of climate change politics, as party competition heavily shapes government policy, and national governments in turn remain central to policymaking on climate change. Parties also link the issue of climate change to the public, and vice versa, and have important roles in shaping attitudes. The critical role of parties is confirmed by recent studies, which all point to the relevance of parties and partisan theory for environmental and climate change outcomes. Looking at EU member states, Jensen and Spoon (2011) found that more pro-environment governments made better progress towards meeting their Kyoto Protocol targets. In examining the extent to which national policies on international environmental issues were influenced by the policy preferences of political parties, Knill et al. (2010) found that the number of policies adopted in OECD countries increased if governmental parties adopted more pro-environment positions. Similarly, Schulze (2014) discovered that partisan environmentalism mattered for ratification responses of 21 OECD countries towards 64 environmental treaties. However, despite the centrality of political parties, the literature exploring this piece of the comparative climate policy puzzle is more or less in its infancy (Carter, 2006, 2013; Jensen and Spoon, 2011; Spoon et al., 2014). Moreover, Carter (2006: 747) notes that ‘there is a strange imbalance in the academic study of the party politics of the environment’. Whereas most issues of green party politics have been examined (e.g. Bomberg, 1998; Müller-Rommel and Poguntke, 2002; Richardson and Rootes, 2006; Spoon, 2009), analysis of how the environment impacts on mainstream (i.e. established and electorally successful) parties and party competition is surprisingly scarce, particularly in countries without an electorally successful green party. Even less literature has examined how the issue of climate change in particular has impacted on mainstream parties, with expert surveys (e.g. the Chapel Hill Expert Survey) positioning parties on the environment, but not on climate change (Bakker et al., 2015). Similarly, the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) data set – a quantitative content analysis of party manifestos often used to position parties – includes a category on the environment only (Volkens et al., 2014). However, climate change can be a substantively different issue than the environment, with different incentives for political parties. The decarbonization of the global economy entails a more fundamental restructuring of markets and more severe regulation of behaviour than addressing any other environmental problem. Moreover, whereas the benefits of addressing more traditional environmental issues often accrue to the present or national electorate, addressing climate change often demands an element of altruism. Politicians have to make cuts in national emissions or invest funds to develop cleaner technologies in order for people in developing countries or future generations to raise their living standards and avoid the consequences of global warming. Therefore, it is the combination of the fundamental restructuring of the economy and human behaviour together with the altruistic imperative which makes climate change a distinct issue from other environmental issues. Many environmental issues warrant a restructuring of an economy or the substitution of popular products (such as ozone depletion and deforestation), and many environmental issues have transboundary and even long-term consequences (such as overfishing and toxic/hazardous waste). However, only climate change combines the two elements and to such a strong degree. The duality of the challenge helps explain why the negotiations during the Conference of the Parties (COP) in Paris were so challenging. Understanding why political parties are more or less positive to climate change is thus an important, and currently underdeveloped, endeavour.

This article thus explains variation in parties’ climate change salience, examining the effects of party characteristics. How prominent parties make the issue of climate change in comparison to other issues tells us a lot about how ambitious they are on it. As such, the article makes contributions to both the comparative climate policy literature and the party politics literature. First, by focusing on political parties and party characteristics, the article fills a significant gap in the comparative climate policy literature, which has often been focused on national governments and country characteristics or international negotiations. Second, by focusing on how mainstream parties respond to the issue of climate change in particular, it fills an important gap in the party politics literature, which has often concerned itself with the environment or green parties only. Lastly, the article makes a significant empirical contribution by creating a novel measure of parties’ climate change salience based on the CMP data. Collectively, these are important gaps to fill. Understanding why mainstream parties make climate change a more or less salient issue sheds light on opportunities and barriers to party competition and action on the issue and importantly also feed into the wider literature on the adaptability of parties to new issues (Båtstrand, 2014; Dalton, 2002, 2009; Knutsen, 1997; Rohrschneider, 1993; Ware, 1996) and the nature of the climate change issue (Carter and Clements, 2015; Gemenis et al., 2012; Pardos-Prado, 2012).

The first section of the article outlines the theories and hypotheses to be tested, while the second section outlines the data and methodology – and in particular the novel measure of climate change salience. This is followed by the results and their discussion. The article finds that mainstream parties have not made climate change a salient issue. Furthermore, though mainstream parties of both the left and the right are broadly found to be incorporating climate change into their political programmes to a certain extent, important differences remain. Left–right ideology is significant in explaining these differences and is more important than any other party characteristic in explaining variation in parties’ climate change salience, underlining the importance of ideology over economic and policy preferences, size and strategic incentives and incumbency constraints. Moreover, this result points towards the partisan (as opposed to the valence) nature of the climate change issue. These results contrast to those of an identical analysis of environmental salience more generally where ideology is found to have no effect, underlining how the two issues should be treated differently and lending further support to the argument that climate change is not a valence issue.

Party characteristics and climate change salience

The nascent literature on the party politics of climate change outlines four broad party characteristics to be tested in this article, two of which relate to partisanship and two of which relate to a party’s position within the party system. These features have previously been identified as affecting parties’ propensity to embrace climate change in various country case studies (e.g. Carter, 2006) but have never been tested comparatively or quantitatively. Although Båtstrand (2015) has taken a step in this direction by comparing nine conservative parties, this remains a small-N study and only compares one party family. Looking beyond single case studies to large-N comparisons, however, allows us to unearth general party tendencies cross-nationally and thus to arrive at conclusions about the effects of party characteristics more confidently.

Ideology

Although ‘new politics’ issues such as the environment and climate change supposedly cut across the traditional left–right divide, there are several reasons why we might expect right-wing parties to respond less positively towards the issue than left-wing parties. Firstly, right-wing parties are typically averse to state intervention and regulation or the expansion of state functions, while such actions align more closely with left-wing ideology. As McCright and Dunlap (2011: 160) highlight, environmental policy ‘typically entails governmental intervention into markets and restrictions on property rights, challenging conservative values, but is consistent with liberals’ view that protecting collective welfare is a proper role of government’. Importantly, decarbonizing the global economy entails more profound intervention into peoples’ lives and markets than addressing traditional environmental problems. As such, we can expect this relationship to be even stronger when it comes to the issue of climate change.

Secondly, as Owens (1986: 197) argues: ‘We might expect environmentalism to be more closely aligned to the philosophy of the left than that of the right, since socialism and “ecocentrism” share a collectivist spirit and have many roots and values in common’. Although this argument also relates to the environment and not to climate change, the point is even more pertinent for the latter issue, as the altruism and collectivist spirit demanded to address the issue is even more acute when it comes to climate change (as politicians are challenged to think of people other than their electorates). Likewise, right-wing ideology is often associated with being socially conservative. Political psychologists find that conservatives are more likely to express system justification tendencies, while liberals are more amenable to critiques of the established order (Feygina et al., 2010; Fielding et al., 2012). Such system justification tendencies are likely to be even more entrenched when it comes to the issue of climate change, as it warrants far greater changes to the status quo than addressing other environmental problems. Thus, we might expect it to be harder for right-wing parties than for left-wing parties to embrace the global solutions needed to address climate change.

Thirdly, the ‘new’ issue of climate change is more likely to be taken up by new or niche parties (e.g. green), thus entailing increased party competition, often on the left of the political spectrum (Spoon et al., 2014). This may in turn lead the mainstream left to take a stronger position on climate change (Rohrschneider, 1993; Spoon et al., 2014).

Thus, overall it is not surprising that empirical research shows that right-wing parties will generally respond less positively to the issue than left-wing parties (Carter 2006, 2013, Dunlap et al., 2001, Kitschelt, 1989, McCright and Dunlap, 2011). As such, I hypothesise that:

H1: Party ideology is associated with the salience given to climate change in party platforms, with right-wing parties giving it less salience than do left-wing parties.

Economic and policy preferences

A party’s economic and policy preferences are not necessarily identical to its left–right ideology and thus need to be treated and tested separately. Parties can be far to the right on the political spectrum yet not embrace a free-market economy, and similarly they can be far to the left of the political spectrum and not embrace state intervention or welfare platforms. Parties are often wedded to certain economic or policy preferences that make it easier or harder for them to embrace the dominant policy means for addressing climate change. Being in favour of a free-market economy, for example, can be hard to reconcile with the state intervention and market regulation that a lot of climate policies necessitate. Such measures are therefore easier to reconcile with more interventionist preferences, such as social democratic or welfare platforms. At the country level, support for welfare and social democracy is associated with support for environmental and climate change protection, as this is connected with more post-materialist and left-leaning values (Krönig, 2010; Witherspoon, 1994: 135). This is supported by Bernauer et al. (2013) who argue that economically ‘kinder, gentler societies’ – that is, countries providing stronger state-sponsored social safety nets for their people – perform better in terms of the environment. Similarly, Rootes et al. (2012) point out that collective action to address climate change has been more difficult to achieve in countries where support for welfare provisions and social democratic values and institutions is weaker. As such, we might expect a similar relationship to exist for political parties. It is consequently expected that:

H2: A party’s policy and economic preferences are associated with the salience given to climate change in party platforms, with parties who are more in favour of a free-market economy giving it less salience than do parties with more interventionist preferences.

Size and strategic incentives

The size of a party affects its strategic incentive to embrace climate change and make it a salient issue. Smaller parties especially are faced with strategic incentives to emphasise climate change. Due to their lower vote share and the resulting lack of media and popular attention, smaller parties are more likely to emphasise ‘extreme’ or niche positions such as climate change in order to gain attention. Moreover, not having to cater for or catch the broad church of voters that large parties need to become a governing party, smaller parties tend to be more ideologically driven to maintain their small yet crucial voter base, resulting in increased emphasis on extreme or niche positions (Abou-Chadi and Orlowski, 2016). Another incentive for small parties to take up such positions is to achieve policy differentiation and issue ownership (Wagner, 2012). Spoon et al. (2014) argue that it is harder for larger mainstream parties to shift to a greener position, as they are already committed to certain issues because of their ideology and reputation. In contrast, the ‘political losers’ (or less well-established parties) within a party system are more likely to emphasise extreme or niche issues, as they are more likely to benefit from the emergence of the new issue and have less to lose in terms of reputation (De Vries and Hobolt, 2012; Spoon et al., 2014). I consequently hypothesise that:

H3: Party size is associated with the salience given to climate change in party platforms, with larger parties giving it less salience than do smaller parties.

Incumbency constraints

Whether a party is in or out of government is also likely to affect its propensity to make climate change a salient issue. The party competition literature suggests that opposition parties will more likely emphasise new issues such as climate change, as they will be eager to find ways of attacking the government. As highlighted by Klingemann et al. (1995: 28), opposition parties ‘have a strong incentive for innovative framing of alternatives to current policy. Incumbents have a record, but the opposition has only its word’. Opposition parties can more easily criticise the status quo and also do not have to stand to account for the current levels of ambition. However, as Carter (2006: 751) points out:

When a party moves from opposition to government, and thereby directly confronts all the practical difficulties of environmental governance – the intractability of many problems, the high financial and political costs of solutions compared to the often invisible benefits – then it might temper any previous enthusiasm for environmental issues.

The final hypothesis thus regards the effect of incumbency constraints on parties:

H4: Incumbency constraints are associated with the salience given to climate change in party platforms, with parties in government giving it less salience than do parties in opposition.

Data and methodology

As mentioned previously, there is limited data available allowing us to explore how established parties respond to the issue of climate change, with expert surveys and the CMP data set only examining the issue of the environment. If coded manually, however, the latter source allows us to uncover information specifically on climate change. The climate change content of parties’ manifestos is subsumed within a larger code for all environmental policies¹, thus the two issues were separated in order to only measure climate change salience.² Climate change content was only coded as such if explicitly about climate change, to provide a conservative measure. These included statements about the dangers of climate change and the importance of protecting the earth for future generations, emissions reduction targets, targets for renewable energy, green taxes aimed at reducing emissions and explicit mitigation policies (e.g. energy efficiency programmes, retrofitting insulation and improving building standards, investing in public transport and incentivising low-emissions vehicles and anti-deforestation policies). Several quasi-sentences were climate change related (i.e. implementing the proposed policy would have a large climate change mitigation or adaptation benefit); however, unless the policy was explicitly for this purpose, it was not coded as climate change content. After establishing the total number of climate change quasi-sentences in the party’s manifesto, this was then converted into a proportion of the overall manifesto by dividing it by the total number of manifesto quasi-sentences.

Party manifestos are a good way of gauging how important the issue of climate change is for a party. Politicians might make grand statements about the importance of addressing climate change, but seeing how much of their manifesto is devoted to the issue in comparison to other issues is revealing. Also, manifestos are the result of ‘complex debates and negotiations over the normative essence of a party, its strategies at any point in time and its definitions of friends and foes’ (Fella and Ruzza, 2006: 183) and ‘provide objective data for analysis (…) on the basis of its own authoritative policy pronouncement’ (Budge, 2002). As such, it is a good – and importantly comparable – measure of salience. An additional benefit of using the CMP data is that it is not simply measuring the frequency of quasi-sentences that are about climate change, but statements that are positive towards climate change action, thus demonstrating concern and intent. Given the CMP’s assumption that the environment and climate change are valence issues, there is no corresponding measure of negative statements (which would have allowed for a more ‘positional’ judgement). However, though such negative statements will perhaps become more prevalent in the future as climate sceptic politicians and parties increase in number and prominence, parties are at present usually not explicitly against climate change (even though they might in reality be). As such, the lack of positive statements might be a more accurate way to gauge a party’s feelings on the issue, that is, demonstrating a lack of concern or ambition. Thus, the amount of attention parties pay to climate change in their manifestos – how salient and prominent they make it in comparison to other issues – tells us a lot about how far they have embraced it.

Having outlined the dependent variable, attention is now turned to the operationalisation of the independent variables. To measure the effect of parties’ left–right ideology, the article uses the CMP’s right–left positioning. Although this measure has occasionally been criticized (see Gemenis, 2013 for an overview), it remains widely used and has almost achieved a monopoly status in the field (Laver and Garry, 2000: 620). Importantly, in a thorough review and analysis of the measure, Mölder (2013) finds that it is valid for countries that have not experienced a communist past, which is what I am concerned with in this article. To measure the effect of parties’ economic and policy preferences, the article uses the composite CMP measure of how favourable a party is to a free-market economy³. The parties’ share of the vote⁴ is used to measure the effect of party size. To measure the effect of incumbency constraints, a dummy variable was created and parties were awarded a score of 1 or 0 depending on whether they were in government or opposition (respectively) at the time of writing their manifesto. The descriptive statistics for all the variables can be found in the Online Appendix (Table 1A).

Climate change really ascended the party political agenda during 2006 with the publication of the Stern Review and the release of Al Gore’s documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. These events were followed by the publication of the 4th IPCC report in 2007, the financial crisis in 2008 and the COP in Copenhagen in 2009. Given the increased prominence of climate change after these events – and given the equally pressing challenges of the financial crisis – the period post-2008 is thus a ‘hard case’ to test parties’ true ambitions and willingness to address the issue. If more than one election was coded post-2008, the first election closest to this year was chosen in order to increase comparability across countries.

Only parties from developed democracies (OECD countries) were chosen, as these have a particular responsibility under the UNFCCC to deal with climate change (due to their historical emissions as well as their greater wealth and capacity to deal with the issue). Some countries and parties did not have manifestos coded after this period and were thus excluded. Denmark and Iceland were also excluded due to them not having manifestos in the traditional sense (these are extremely short and more like ‘brochures’), making substantive comparability an issue. Further, given that we are primarily concerned with how mainstream parties respond to climate change, outlier parties with levels of climate change salience higher than three standard deviations above the mean were removed⁵. An overview of the countries and parties included in the data set (127 parties from 18 countries) and the election year is shown in Table 1. An overview of the proportion of each party’s manifesto devoted to climate change is shown in the Online Appendix (Table 1B).

Table 1.

Countries, parties and election year included in the data set.

Country	Parties included	Date of manifesto/election
Sweden	V, SAP, FP, Kd, MSP and SD	2010
Norway	SV, AP, V, KrF, H, Sp and FrP	2009
Finland	VL, VAS, SSDP, KD, KK, SK, PS and RKP/SFP	2009
Belgium	Green, sp.a, openVLD, LDD, CD&V, N-VA and VB	2010
The Netherlands	GL, SP, PvdA, D’66, VVD, CDA, CU, PVV, PvdD and SGP	2010
Luxembourg	GLEI-GAP, La Gauche, LSAP/POLS, DP/PD, CSV/PCS and ADR	2009
France	FDG, Les Verts, PRG, PS, PR, MoDem, UMP, NC, AC and FN	2012
Italy	RC, PdL, SEL, PD, CD, SC, UdC, FDI-CDN, 3L, SVP and VdA–APF	2013
Spain	Geroa Bai, Amaiur, Compromí’s-Q, IU, PSOE, UPyD, PP, CiU, FAC, PNV/EAJ, ERC, CC and BNG	2011
Portugal	PEV, BE, PCP, PS, PSD and CDS-PP	2009
Germany	Bündnis’90/DieGrünen, LINKE, SPD, FDP and CDU/CSU	2009
Switzerland	GLP, SPS/PSS, FDP/PRD, CVP/PDC, EVP/PEV, CSP/PCS, SVP/UDC, BDP/PBD and MCG	2011
United Kingdom	Labour, LibDem and Conservative	2010
Ireland	ULA, Greens, Socialist, Labour, Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin	2011
United States	Democrat and Republican	2012
Canada	Green, NDP, LP, CP and BQ	2011
Australia	Greens, ALP, LPA, LNP and NPA	2010
New Zealand	Greens, Labour, ACT, United Future, National, NZF, Maori Party and Mana Mana	2011

An OLS multiple regression is then performed, clustering the standard errors around country membership to help correct for the intra-class correlation and relax the requirements of sampling independence.

Results

The climate change salience of parties’ manifestos ranges from 0% at the lowest to 15% at the most, with the mean being 3.3%. Although most parties mention climate change in their manifestos, there is still significant variation between parties. Breaking it down into party families in Figure 1, we can see that ecologist or green parties clearly have higher levels of salience, and we can also see a downward trend towards the right of the figure (and political spectrum), meaning that right-wing parties generally have lower levels of salience. However, the trend is weak and not straightforward. The more centrist party families (e.g. Christian Democrat and Conservative) have higher levels of salience than their neighbouring party family to the left for example, and there is variation both within party families and between party families on each side of the political spectrum.

Figure 1.

Proportion of climate change salience by party family.

Running the OLS regression to see which party characteristics explain this variation (clustering the standard errors around country membership), we get the following results.

The model examining the effect of left–right ideology, economic and policy preferences, size and strategic incentives and incumbency constraints on levels of climate change salience is significant, F (4, 17) = 5.37, p < 0.01, and accounts for 12% of the variation in climate change salience (R²). Given that we are only examining the effect of party characteristics, this is a fairly strong result and demonstrates the importance of such features in explaining variation in parties’ climate change salience. Table 2 shows the results of the analysis. As we can see, only the party’s left–right ideology is significant. This supports the first hypothesis, namely, that the attribute of being right wing is negatively associated with the levels of climate change salience. Further, this result underlines the importance of ideology over economic and policy preferences, size and strategic incentives and incumbency constraints.

Table 2.

Explaining variation in parties’ climate change salience.

Variable	Coefficient (standard error)
Left–right ideology	−0.0005 (0.0001)**
Free-market economy	−0.0002 (0.0004)
Size	−0.0003 (0.0002)
Incumbency constraint	0.0065 (0.0056)
N	127
χ²(model fit)	5.37**
R ²	0.1186

Note: VIF scores for left–right ideology and free-market economy are 1.68 and 1.69, respectively, that is, no problems of multicollinearity.

*p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001.

However, though outlier parties have been removed from the analysis, the remaining ecological parties within the data set might be behind this strong effect of ideology (as seen in Figure 1, they clearly have higher levels of salience than other party families). To check whether the results are being overly affected by the inclusion of ecological parties in the data set, the model was rerun excluding these parties. However, the result remained significant (p < 0.05), thus the model including all party families is used and we can be confident that there is an effect of ideology.

None of the other party characteristics under investigation were significant, meaning that hypothesis 2, hypothesis 3 and hypothesis 4 cannot be confirmed. However, the direction of two of the relationships was as predicted. The more pro-free-market economy a party is, the lower its’ levels of climate change salience. Similarly, size has a negative effect, meaning that the larger the party is the lower its’ levels of climate change salience. Incumbency constraints had an opposite relationship to that hypothesised, with parties in government having higher levels of climate change salience than those in opposition – perhaps because being in government forces parties to address the issue.

Lastly, in order to check whether the results for climate change salience are substantively different from environmental salience, the analysis is rerun using the original environmental CMP code⁶. The results of the analysis can be seen in Table 3.

Table 3.

Explaining variation in parties’ environmental salience.

Variable	Coefficient (standard error)
Left–right ideology	−0.0325 (0.0392)
Free-market economy	−0.0923 (0.1594)
Size	−0.0003 (0.0425)*
Incumbency constraint	0.3664 (1.0143)
N	127
χ² (model fit)	4.30*
R ²	0.0728

*p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001.

Table 3 shows that the model is in fact significant (F(4, 17) = 4.30, p < 0.05), though less so than when applied to climate change salience. Importantly, left–right ideology is not significant in explaining the variation in environmental salience, and only size is (marginally) significant in doing so. This points towards the two issues having different incentives for political parties.

Discussion

Climate change is the most complex global commons problem humanity has ever faced. Political parties are key to solving the issue, thus it is important to understand why political parties are more or less positive to climate change and make it a more or less prominent issue. Overall, this article reveals that mainstream parties have not made climate change a salient issue. This result feeds into the wider literature on the adaptability of parties to new issues. One of the prime democratic functions of political parties is to articulate and represent the interests existing within a society. Whereas the economic cleavage has provided the basic framework for party competition since the formation of mass party systems (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967), the increasing salience of post-materialist and cultural issues such as climate change reflects the changing issue agendas of advanced industrial societies, where traditional class-based alignments are being replaced by value-based ones (Dalton, 2009; Inglehart, 1990). The emergence of climate change thus ‘provides an opportunity to track how party systems change in response to a new programmatic challenge’ (Dalton, 2009: 171).

Two competing hypotheses have been propounded in this respect. One states that environmentalism and climate change presents a new political dimension orthogonal to the traditional economic one and that existing parties will struggle to address this new issue. The second hypothesis argues that environmentalism and climate change is gradually being incorporated into the established left/right party alignment (Dalton, 2009; Dalton et al., 1984; Kitschelt, 1989; Knutsen, 1987). If the former hypothesis is correct and the separation between the economic and environmental dimensions persists, this would imply that contemporary party systems are struggling to reconcile these conflicting political dimensions. If the latter hypothesis is correct, however, and climate change is largely being integrated into the pre-existing party structure, this would either suggest that the initial challenge was overstated or that democratic party systems display an impressive ability to integrate alternative political frameworks (Dalton, 2009: 162).

Although the findings of this article certainly do not confirm the first hypothesis, they do not provide overwhelming support for the second either. Mainstream parties have indeed largely incorporated the issue of climate change into their programmes, and the irrelevance of a party’s economic and policy preferences (hypothesis 2), party size (hypothesis 3) and incumbency constraints (hypothesis 4) in explaining the variation between the parties provides countervailing evidence to the hypothesis that climate change is an orthogonal and incompatible dimension to the traditional economic one. Larger mainstream parties presumably do not automatically shy away from making climate change a prominent issue, and neither does a strong commitment to a free-market economy nor being in government. However, it would be a stretch to argue that a mean of 3.3% of manifestos devoted to climate change indicates that mainstream parties have embraced or politicised the issue. Given the seriousness, scale and urgency of the problem, one would perhaps expect larger proportions of manifestos to be devoted to the issue.

The low proportion of manifestos devoted to the issue could, however, be the result of the CMP data set’s conservative coding scheme, whereby quasi-sentences in the manifestos are coded into one – and only one – of the 56 standard categories. In other words, statements that are related to climate change (in that they would have a strong mitigation or adaptation benefit, for example) might instead be coded as being about ‘technology and infrastructure’ or ‘market regulation’, if this is the most obvious meaning of the statement. Only statements that are explicitly about ‘green’ policies are coded as such, providing a conservative measure. Overall, however, the findings of the article show that the jury is still very much out on the adaptability of parties to new programmatic challenges.

The article has also revealed that although the majority of parties of both the left and the right incorporate climate change into their political programmes to a certain extent, important differences remain. The fact that left–right ideology is more important than any other party characteristic in explaining these differences might point towards the partisan (as opposed to the valence) nature of the climate change issue. A valence issue is a ‘consensus issue’ where the whole electorate is in agreement with the desired outcome, and parties thus only have one position on it. As such, party competition is structured around performance (i.e. parties debate who will be the best or most efficient party to deal with the issue) rather than around ‘positions’ which involve trade-offs (Stokes, 1963). However, recent research has begun to question the valence status of the environment, and climate change in particular (e.g. Pardos-Prado, 2012), with research finding significant differences between parties (e.g. Carter, 2013; Carter and Clements, 2015) and Gemenis et al. (2012) finding that some parties (particularly the radical right) take explicitly anti-environmental positions. This also feeds into a growing literature on party polarisation on climate change (e.g. Dunlap and McCright, 2008; Dunlap et al. 2016; Tranter, 2013).

The findings of this article feed into this debate. The partisan differences in levels of climate change salience and the significance of left–right ideology in explaining the variation tentatively lend support to the argument that climate change is not a valence issue. Moreover, the fact that left–right ideology was insignificant in explaining the variation in environmental salience underlines how the two issues can in fact be substantively different issues with different incentives for political parties. Although the models for both climate change and environmental salience were significant, the latter was less so. Further, it is perhaps unsurprising that size was significant in explaining variation in environmental salience, as the issue remains somewhat on the fringe of the political mainstream and as such there is an incentive for the political losers to pick it up. The significance of left–right ideology in explaining variation in climate change salience, however, points towards the issue challenging the core values of a party, as opposed to it merely relating to a party’s position within the party system (and consequent strategic incentives). Whereas more traditional environmental issues can be considered ‘valence issues’ as the benefits of addressing them often accrue to the current and national population (e.g. improved air or water quality), climate change challenges parties to prioritise long-term (and often ‘radical’) goals over short-term gains and to altruistically think of people other than their electorates (whether people in other countries or future generations). The different results for the analyses of climate change and environmental salience thus reveal a weakness of the CMP coding scheme and the need for more data examining the relationship between political parties and climate change specifically. The empirical contribution of this article is one step in that direction.

However, it should be noted that left–right ideology is a broad, multifaceted and contested concept (e.g. Franzmann, 2015) and that the issue of climate change presents a dual challenge for parties (i.e. it entails profound market intervention as well as an element of altruism). The latter feature of the issue, namely that acting on climate change incurs costs that might produce greater global benefits relative to national benefits, might be opposed equally by parties to the far left and the far right of the political spectrum (e.g. left-wing nationalist and right-wing nationalists). Thus, although social and economic features of parties’ left–right ideology usually correspond, there are important exceptions. As such, further research is required to unpack the various elements of left–right ideology (e.g. to identify whether social or economic characteristics are more important in explaining the outcome) and also to pinpoint which feature of the climate change issue is more significant in explaining the outcome. If future research identifies the altruistic element of the climate change issue as challenging the core values of a party, it might also be useful to examine whether there is a need to introduce a ‘nationalist versus cosmopolitan’ dimension to explain the variation, which cuts across the left–right divide. Furthermore, we do not know whether mainstream left-wing parties respond more strongly to the issue of climate change than mainstream right-wing parties due to ideological ‘ease’ or whether it is simply due to stronger party competition from parties further to the left.

Regardless of these gaps in our knowledge, however, the relevance of left–right ideology in explaining the variation in parties’ climate change salience identified in this article highlights the importance of political parties and party politics in making sense of the comparative climate policy puzzle. If left–right ideology is more important than parties’ economic and policy preferences, their size and strategic incentives and their incumbency constraints, this could indicate that parties and partisan theory is an important obstacle or catalyst to action on climate change. However, another worthwhile avenue of future investigation would be to test the findings of this article in a larger multilevel analysis, comparing the relative importance of party characteristics in comparison to country-level characteristics, and to explore the interactions between the two. Likewise, it would be useful to explore the relationship between parties’ climate change salience and public concern, that is, whether public opinion influences political parties and their climate change platforms or whether the parties themselves shape public opinion on the issue by providing cues for the electorate. Such investigations would significantly contribute to the burgeoning literature on the party politics of climate change.

Conclusion

The recent Paris Agreement highlights the stark variation between developed states’ ambitions on climate change. Understanding which party characteristics incentivise parties to make climate change a more or less prominent issue is an important and understudied part of this comparative climate policy puzzle. Moreover, examining the relationship between mainstream parties and climate change is an understudied part of the party politics literature. Overall, the article has revealed that mainstream parties have not made climate change a very prominent issue, questioning the adaptability of parties to new programmatic challenges. Further, although mainstream parties of both the left and the right have been found to be incorporating climate change into their political programmes to a certain extent, significant differences remain. The article has found that left–right ideology is more important than any other party characteristic in explaining the variation in climate change salience. This underlines the importance of ideology over economic and policy preferences, size and strategic incentives and incumbency constraints and points towards the partisan (as opposed to the valence) nature of the climate change issue. Moreover, the different results for the analyses of climate change and environmental salience, respectively, point towards them being substantively different issues with different incentives for political parties and lend further support to the argument that climate change is not a valence issue. These findings reveal a weakness of the CMP data set and the need for more data examining the relationship between political parties and climate change specifically. The novel measure of parties’ climate change salience presented in this article is a significant empirical contribution to this effect.

Supplemental material

Supplemental Material, pp-2016-0124-File001 - What explains variation in parties’ climate change salience?

Supplemental Material, pp-2016-0124-File001 for What explains variation in parties’ climate change salience? by Fay M Farstad in Party Politics

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

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