Do Extreme Weather Events Change Party Climate Policy Preferences?

• In Event: Domestic Contestation of Climate Policy: New Research Frontiers

Abstract

Intensifying extreme weather events such as droughts, wildfires, and hurricanes have not only increased public concerns over climate change, but also motivated a growing literature studying the political impacts of climate change, i.e., the effects of climate-related events on migration, violence, climate public opinion and policy preferences, local fiscal spending and economic losses, political participation, campaign finance, and electoral outcomes. One missing link in this climate change impact literature is whether such extreme weather events change political parties’ preferences toward climate change mitigation and adaptation: no study has ever addressed this important question using systematic data. Indeed, political parties matter greatly in climate change policies. E.g., environmental tax burden in the OECD is influenced by left–right and environmental positions of legislative medians (Ward and Cao 2012). Unlike the left-right and the environmental emphasis dimensions of party ideologies that have been studied by many, parties’ climate policy preferences have received little attention largely because of a lack of available measures. Studies on partisan politics rely on the Party Manifesto data; yet the Manifesto data does not provide measures for climate change preferences. Manual coding of over 1,200 manifestos (most written in a non-English language and needing translation; most have thousands of words) is a challenging endeavor. In this paper, we code party climate policy preferences using a machine learning approach (Zero-shot Bilingual Classifier). With the new measure of party climate policy preference for all OECD countries 1999-2020, we test the relationship between extreme weather events and party climate policy preferences.

Authors

• Yaoyao Dai, University of North Carolina, Charlotte

• Xun Cao, Penn State University