Climate policy and political parties 1993-2015

Carter, Neil and Ladrech, Robert and Little, Conor and Tsagkroni, Vasiliki (2019). Climate policy and political parties 1993-2015. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-852669

Political parties contribute to determining society’s capacity to develop an adequate response to climate change in their roles as policymakers, public opinion leaders and representatives. This project, funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), focuses on how parties develop policies on climate change mitigation. It aims to describe the development of these policies over time and to explain how mainstream European political parties develop their climate policies. It focuses on mainstream parties’ climate policies in six countries (the UK, France, Germany, Denmark, Ireland and Italy), seeking to understand their development by examining their responses to the electorate and electoral competition, the dynamics of coalition-formation and the interplay of internal party groups and interests external to the party.

Data description (abstract)

These data are from the Climate Policy and Political Parties project. They are described by the following article, published in Party Politics: 'Political parties and climate policy. A new approach to measuring parties’ climate policy preferences.' This study presents an innovative approach to hand-coding parties’ policy preferences in the relatively new, cross-sectoral field of climate change mitigation policy. It applies this approach to party manifestos in six countries, comparing the preferences of parties in Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and the UK over the past two decades. It probes the data for evidence of validity through content validation and convergent/discriminant validation and engages with the debate on position-taking in environmental policy by developing a positional measure that incorporates ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ climate policy preferences. The analysis provides evidence for the validity of the new measures, shows that they are distinct from comparable measures of environmental policy preferences, and argues that they are more comprehensive than existing climate policy measures. The new measures strengthen the basis for answering questions that are central to climate politics and to party politics. The approach developed here has important implications for the study of new, complex, or cross-cutting policy issues and issues that include both valence and positional aspects.

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