What is a climate election? The case of the 2019 Federal Election in Canada

Beyond explaining the outcomes of elections, social scientists often seek to understand their meaning. Communication scholars, for example, have attempted to identify the campaigns dominated by new media (Blumler 1968; Stroemer-Galley 2019). Political scientists still debate the relevance of distinguishing elections that reflect a significant partisan realignment or dealignment (Key 1955; DiStefano 2019). More recently, theories on the evolution of political cleavages in advanced democracies have identified the environment as an issue that may increasingly influence party strategy and voters’ choice (Inglehart 1990; Dalton 2018; Stubager et al 2021). Still, political scientists have yet to develop a clear definition of what would constitute a climate change election. The objective of our paper is twofold. We will first identify a series of conditions found in the literature that have been proposed as indicators of a climate change election. We posit that an election can be said to be “climatic” in the ideal-typical sense of the term if: 1) the issue of climate change occupies a significant place in the strategic and tactical agendas of the parties during a campaign and if the positions adopted by the various parties (green, left, right) at this occasion were clear and contrasting, 2) the political and journalistic interpretation of an election outcome gives prominence to the issue of climate change and concludes that the newly elected government has a clear and legitimate mandate to act on this issue, and 3) the issue of climate change exerts a significant impact on voters’ behavior as evidenced when (a) give the climate issue significant prominence, (b) distinguish clearly between the parties' positions not only on the general issue of climate change but also on each party's key policies to address this issue (e.g. carbon pricing). Second, we seek to illustrate these conditions using the 2019 Canadian federal election. We argue that the 2019 Canadian federal election can be labeled a “climate change election” because it provided the winning party with climatic political and electoral mandates at the end of a climatic campaign. These results carry important implications. First, the identification of what would be a "climate change election" is important in itself because their more frequent occurrence in time and space would allow for a clearer and firmer statement on the transformation of the dominant cleavages at the center of the electoral dynamics of a good number of advanced democracies. Second, the conceptual clarification and the empirical analysis that underlies it raises the more global question of the interpretation of the meaning and scope of elections in general. In this perspective, it would be equally legitimate to ask for instance what criteria determine if an election could be characterized as economic, social or cultural for instance. It is to be hoped that the factors identified to define what a climatic election represents a modest first step towards a typology of different elections that would ultimately shed light on their meaning and scope.