The environment on the agenda of Latin American political parties

The environment and climate change are issues that citizens today consider of great importance, as illustrated by the global climate mobilizations of young people. Latin America is neither an exception nor immune to this phenomenon. Political parties are at the centre of climate change policy. However, Latin American political parties face a major dilemma when it comes to politicizing the environmental issue since a large part of the region's national economies is based on the extractivist of raw materials, as has happened in recent decades with the "commodity boom" (Sánchez and García Montero, 2019). This paper aims to shed light on the determinants that explain why Latin American parties consider the environment highly important and give salience to environmental and climate change issues in the electoral competition. To do so, we test different hypotheses related to ideology, liberal-conservative divide, party size, government-opposition, and new and old politics (Inglehart, 1990; Laver and Hunt 1992; Hooghe et al., 2004; Grendstad et al., 2006; Dalton, 2009; Bernauer and Koubi, 2009; Spoon et al., 2014; Båtstrand, 2014; Wen, et al., 2016) using different sources of data. The first findings suggest that being left-wing, liberal, small and opposition parties foster the likelihood of mobilizing climate change and environmental protection issues most.