Do Political Parties in Europe React to Citizens' Concerns about Climate Change? Association Between Public Opinion Shift and Party Environmental Politics Shift in case of Conservative vs. Liberal parties and Right-Wing vs. Left-Wing parties

This paper aims to analyse whether there is a shift in the environmental politics of political parties in the EU countries and the UK connected to a shift in public opinion on green politics and whether the response differs between liberal vs. conservative parties and right vs. left-wing parties. A multilevel regression model was used for the analysis. The unit of analysis is each political party in election years. The level is established at the poll level, where the standard errors are clustered. This method is inspired by the work of Adams et al. (2006) Are Niche Parties Fundamentally Different from Mainstream Parties? The Causes and the Electoral Consequences of Western European Parties' Policy Shifts, 1976-1998. For the paper, the author used data from the Eurobarometer, the Manifesto Project, and V-democracy. The Eurobarometer data showed in all countries surveyed (except Greece) continuously increasing public concern about environmental threats between 2004 and 2021. However, what varies between countries is the extent of these concerns. Therefore, the paper was divided into three groups of countries with high, medium, and low public concerns about the environmental threats, as it can be assumed that in countries with high concerns, political parties will be forced to respond to an environmental opinion more than in countries where environmentalism is not a citizens‘ priority. The results of the analysis showed that in countries with high public concern, conservative parties tend to respond to strengthening public environmental opinion by strengthening their green politics. Liberal parties, on the other hand, do not respond to shifts in opinion. This can be assumed to be due to the fact that conservative political parties in these countries are less supportive of green politics and the shift in opinion away from their environmentalist positions puts them at a disadvantage, which they seek to change by strengthening their green politics. No difference was observed between right-wing and left-wing parties. These groups of parties do not react in these countries to changes in environmental opinion.