Climate Discourse in EU Party Manifestos and Climate Policy Implementation

• In Event: Analyzing Debate and Discourse about Science and Environmental Issues

Abstract

How do political parties discuss climate change and climate policies in their manifestos? To what extent does such discourse correlate with countries’ climate policy output? With more ambitious climate action required to achieve global climate mitigation goals, climate change has become increasingly salient in the political arena. However, the literature currently lacks a comprehensive analysis of EU parties’ climate policy positions and of the extent to which parties’ electoral programs are translated into climate policy output. In this paper, we build a dataset of party positions on climate change and climate policy instruments for most parties active in all EU countries from 1980 to 2021. To do so, we test and apply a set of multilingual transformers to the corpus of political manifestos made available by the Manifesto Project. To test the correlation between political discourse in the electoral manifestos of winning coalitions and the amount and stringency of climate policies that are actually implemented, we combine our dataset on party positions with data on implemented climate policies made available by the OECD Climate Actions and Policy Measurement Framework. With this paper, we make the following contributions: 1) The expansion of the Manifesto Project dataset to include specific climate policy variables for EU countries; 2) The implementation of an efficient and replicable pipeline for multilingual and multiclass text classification for political discourse; and 3) The evaluation of correlations between party positions on climate policy and actual climate mitigation policy outcomes.

Authors

• Mary Sanford, RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment

• Silvia Pianta, European Institute on Economics and the Environment

• Nicolas Schmid, ETH Zurich