Party Competition on Climate Change: Real or Perceived Polarization?

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

Abstract

Climate change has become an increasingly prominent issue in electoral campaigns. In this paper, we shed more light on (objective and perceived) party competition on climate change. Party competition is important as parties both help transform public opinion into policy, but can also be found to politicize climate policy and contribute to polarizing societies. Our research interest is two-fold: First, we are interested how the issue of climate change has impacted on party competition in four countries (Germany, Hungary, Switzerland, UK) over the past 20 years. We use data from our own collection effort from party manifestos and empirically show that the issue has evolved from a valence towards a positional issue. Second, we use own survey (experimental) data from the 2021 German and the 2022 Hungarian election to evaluate whether people accurately perceive parties’ positions on ambitious climate policy. Previous studies in the European multi-party setting have found little evidence, that there is a linkage between party manifestos and the public perception of parties’ policy positions. Our results show that voters’ placement of the parties on the salient CO2 tax issue accurately follows the relative positions we obtained from our coding of the party manifestos in Germany, but not in Hungary. Moreover, we find that voters that self-place on the right of the political spectrum view party competition on climate policy as less polarized than voters on the left. Our results contribute to a better understanding of how climate change has and will continue to alter party competition.

Authors

• Lena Maria Schaffer, University of Luzern

• Zsuzsanna Blanka Magyar, Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals

• Christina Isabel Zuber, University of Konstanz