Navigating Climate Concern amid Economic Hardship: Exploring the Influence of Political Parties on the Saliency of Environmental Politics in Europe

When is economic risk a barrier to environmental concerns? The United Nations COP28 called for a ‘just transition’ to renewable energy sources and away from carbon. According to a widespread interpretation, ‘just transition’ policy strategies in democratic contexts combine climate policies with redistributive and welfare state policies to shelter disadvantaged individuals and communities from paying the costs of decarbonisation. This article studies whether party policy programs combining redistribution and environmentalism in different European capitalist democracies can broaden support for environmental policy amongst those experiencing high levels of economic risk. Previous research suggests environmental concerns arise as a post-materialist issue under conditions of economic security. People’s immediate economic problems reduce voters' concerns about climate change, perceived as a long-term problem. The paper posits that ‘just transition’ policy programs appeal to a broad group of voters across the economic risk dimension. This is because climate policies that address their distributive costs simultaneously tackle economic and environmental risks. This article contributes to a growing body of literature highlighting the influence of parties’ stances on voters' environmental positions. The article provides broad evidence from fourteen Western and CEE European countries. Party policy stances are drawn from parliamentary debates gathered from the ParlaMint corpus, a multilingual dataset containing speeches from more than 20 national and regional parliaments. The corpus covers the period from 2015 to mid-2022. Parties are classified according to how they position their programs in two dimensions. The first dimension, labelled 'Environmental Protection: Positive,' is established through the ‘manifestoberta’ model. Leveraging multilingual XLM-RoBERTa, this model proficiently organises diverse political discourses in alignment with the comprehensive coding scheme of the Comparative Manifesto Project, operating seamlessly across various languages. In addition, a novel dimension is introduced, originating from parties' perspectives on the ‘just transition’ concept. To identify segments of speeches addressing this theme, a zero-shot text classification model is employed to automatically assign scores based on a predefined label designed to represent discourses addressing the just transition topic. The text segments undergo manual labelling to assess their genuine engagement with the topic. For added depth, a comparison will be conducted between parliamentary debates and both the Comparative Manifesto Database and CHES-Europe expert survey data. Data on party policy positions is then merged with their constituent’s individual-level attitudes on climate politics taken from the European Social Survey round 8 (2016) and 10 (2020). Two separate analyses consider both the effect of ‘just transition’ party programmes on the two ESS waves pooled together, as well as the changes in party stances between 2016 and 2020 (using a first-difference estimator). In the first part of the analysis, the paper hypothesises that voters of parties that adopt both environmentalist and pro-redistribution policy stances are less sceptical about climate change when in financial hardship. The second part of the analysis looks at whether political parties can influence the environmental opinions of voters when changing their party program over time (2016 – 2020). Controls are included for second-dimension political competition, and different welfare state systems are considered separately.