How have the discursive strategies from radical right and green party families evolved in a context of the increasing saliency of climate change over the last five decades?

How have the discursive strategies from radical right and green party families evolved in a context of the increasing salience of climate change over the last five decades? The green party family emerged from the post-materialist cleavage and has found a durable narrative in highlighting the need for environmental protection. Radial-right parties emerged from the globalization cleavage with an equally durable anti-immigration and anti-system narrative. These two party families often find themselves on the opposite sides of the cultural GAL-TAN dimension in multiparty systems, affecting party polarisation in the political system. Moreover, some radical-right parties expressed explicit pro-car sentiments when they emerged at the same time as green parties, signalling an attempt to be identified in opposition to the politicisation of environmental concerns (e.g. the Swiss Autopartei in 1984). With the effects climate change becoming increasingly harder to ignore and polarisation (whether ideological or affective) on the rise, it is important to understand what substantive and discursive claims these two party families make about this topic and the style they use to do it. Tracing the climate change discourse of these two party families over time will allow us to separate the stable core of their beliefs from the election-specific campaign rhetoric. It will also allow us to paint a picture of the discursive style these two party families use. The latter is particularly important for radical-right parties, for whom the label ‘populist’ is often used, which arguably refers to more of a stylistic family resemblance than substantive commonalities. In a first step, we qualitatively compare the discursive style of these two party families by focusing on the humour they use in recent campaign speeches when talking about environmental issues. If we accept that radical-right parties represent the TAN-end of the cultural dimension in a party system and green parties the GAL-end, and if we accept that those polar opposites coincide with the differences between US conservatives (Republicans) and progressives (Democrats), using the framework proposed by Young (2020) shows promise. She demonstrates that Democrats favour irony, because of their higher need for cognition and higher tolerance for ambiguity, to advance normative arguments. Republicans favour outrage (used humorously) because they lack the psychological traits mentioned above, and use humour as a shield (“only joking”) when accused of crossing a line of decency or decorum. Campaign speeches by Flemish radical-right and green party leaders for the 2019 federal elections are used as an exploratory case. In a second step, a computational approach will be applied: a classification model will be trained to distinguish these two discursive styles and correctly predict which ideology a text belongs to. By treating ideologies as discourses and taking style as seriously as substance, this project hopes to contribute to the literature on ideological polarization in multi-party systems and to the knowledge on the evolving salience of climate change in green and radical-right ideologies. Young, D. Goldthwaite (2020) Irony and outrage: The polarized landscape of rage, fear, and laughter in the United States. Oxford University Press, USA