Positions on Climate Change Across the Centre-To-Right Spectrum and the Role of the Radical Right

Centrist and mainstream centre-right parties play a crucial role in shaping climate policies in industrialized countries, yet they remain the most understudied political families regarding positions on climate change. In this sense, the literature tends to focus on green and radical right parties, often overlooking centre-to-right parties, despite their presence in multiple national governments and coalitions and the significant variations in their positions that remain underexplored. Using a mixed-methods approach, a multilingual large language model (XLM-RoBERTa) is fine-tuned to identify climate-related content in party manifestos, which is then manually coded to position the parties. To do so, all the quasi-sentences from the manifestos are coded as pro-climate, anti-climate, neutral, or irrelevant, following a codebook that establishes multiple climate policy categories and subcategories. Drawing on existing literature on issue ownership and party competition, I investigate the main factors shaping centrist and mainstream centre-right parties' stances on climate change across 20 industrialized countries over the last two decades. I specifically focus on the roles of incumbency, fossil fuel dependency, public attitudes, and the influence of radical right performance, while also accounting for variations across time and countries.