Domestic Contestation of Climate Policy: New Research Frontiers

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The global climate is changing. In terms of mitigating the worst impacts from climate change, the 2020s can be considered a decisive decade for state action. Nation states desperately need to accelerate their efforts to address the global bad, but have been hesitant to implement more consequential and ambitious climate policies. Over the past decade, scholars have been interested in comparatively explaining differences in climate policy output or outcome. In doing so, existing research mainly focused on differences between countries yet largely ignored the distributional implications of climate policies within countries. However, with the increasing prominence of the climate issue on both governments’ agenda as well as within public attention and with more ambitious policies finally being enacted, contestation within the domestic sphere has increased too.

The fundamental societal challenge of decarbonization, the individual and societal costs, as well as fairness and equity issues associated with it have led to a more politicized debate within the public sphere. Intermediaries such as political parties or news media are important in structuring the debate but have received comparatively little attention within the literature on climate policy. This panel brings together four exciting papers that shed light on different causes and consequences of public contestation of climate policy. Together, they present new theories, measures, and findings that address some of the most important unanswered questions in the literature of climate change. For instance, how do different types of national media take up the issue of climate change and frame the distributional consequences for society? Are political parties changing their positioning on climate in the wake of extreme weather events? And, which political parties are associated with progressive and fair climate policy? Finally, what is the role of public opinion? Do high energy prices and increased costs of living crowd out much needed public support for climate policy progression?

More specifically, Lechner and Spilker focus on news media as an important intermediary in democracies and in this role news media can both dampen but also increase political polarization. They investigate how climate-associated inequalities are framed and reproduced in national media outlets and tackle this question relying on a comparative media analysis based on a comparative newspaper analysis based on 26 newspapers in 16 countries.

The following two papers focus on the partisan politics of climate change. Dai and Cao inquire whether extreme weather events change political parties’ preferences toward climate change mitigation and adaptation. They rely on an automated-text analysis of the manifesto data of all political parties in all OECD countries between 1999-2020 to investigate which parties indeed change their position on climate change. Schaffer et al. are interested in the development and polarization of party competition on climate change in four European countries. Moreover, they use two surveys with experimental components to see whether voter’s positioning of parties on the topic of climate change mirrors the parties’ manifesto position. Their results contribute to a better understanding of how climate change alters party competition and increases societal contestation.

In times of rising energy prices and inflationary pressure, the fourth paper asks the timely question whether people’s appetite for ambitious climate policy decreases due to cost of living increasing. In his paper, Liam Beiser-McGrath is interested in how recent spikes in energy costs impact on people’s energy and climate policy preferences. Using a survey experiment conducted in Great Britain, he finds that while climate policy preferences are sensitive to changing economic conditions, with the “right” compensatory measures accompanying them public support can remain high.

Overall, by addressing various aspects of domestic contestation, the papers of this panel contribute to a better understanding of the challenges and potential political limits of enacting ambitious climate policies. As a consequence, the panel shifts the focus from the general recognition that more ambitious climate policy is needed, to the study of how to implement such policies in time of public contestation

Sub Unit

• Division 39: Science, Technology, and Environmental Politics

Individual Presentations

• Unequal Reporting on Climate-Change in News Worldwide - Lisa Lechner, University of Innsbruck; Gabriele S. Spilker, University of Konstanz

• Do Extreme Weather Events Change Party Climate Policy Preferences? - Yaoyao Dai, University of North Carolina, Charlotte; Xun Cao, Penn State University

• Party Competition on Climate Change: Real or Perceived Polarization? - Lena Maria Schaffer, University of Luzern; Zsuzsanna Blanka Magyar, Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals; Christina Isabel Zuber, University of Konstanz

• Policy in Hard Times: How Energy Insecurity Shapes Preferences - Liam F. Beiser-McGrath, London School of Economics and Political Science

Chair

• Gabriele S. Spilker University of Konstanz

Discussants

• Patrick Bayer University of Glasgow

• Julia Leininger German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS, formerly German Development Institute)