Nationalism and Environment Protection in Party Competition

This paper analyses nationalist parties’ stances on environment policies in Europe. Doing so, it considers nationalist parties that represent the national majority or a national minority. It argues that nationalist parties are generally in favor of environment protection as part of their project to protect the nation’s cultural heritage. However, as effective action against climate change and other challenges to the environment require cooperation at the international level, nationalist parties with a right-wing ideology in particular in combination with populism tend to oppose environment protection policies because of their central goal to safeguard national sovereignty. In contrast to right-wing nationalist parties, left-wing nationalist parties, that can be mainly found among minority nationalist parties in Europe, tend to support environmental policies as they are supportive of international cooperation advancing leftist ideas. We quantitatively test these hypotheses relying on the MARPOR, CHES and V-Party datasets controlling for parties position in government, the public demand for environment protection and the electoral success of green parties among others. The paper therefore advances the argument that the ideological breeding ground for opposition to environmental protection is not nationalism in itself but the combination of nativist nationalism and populism.