The debate over environmental protection did not structure European party systems, but has recently affected political parties by putting new issues on the agenda. This paper studies how non-green mainstream parties have politicized these issues in Britain and France since 1979. The paper starts by a review of the existing literature on environmental politics and on the relationship between issues, parties and cleavages. I argue that, contrary to general assumptions, it is problematic to consider ''the environment'' as one single issue and to reduce it to a unidimensional space – pro- vs anti-environment – a priori. I also claim that the debate between spatial (parties compete by taking distinct positions on issues) and saliency theories (parties compete by emphasizing distinct issues) should be sorted out empirically. Thus, I specify environmental issues according to a new classification, distinguishing between valence issues – where all parties take the same position – ''proprietal'' issues – where only one party takes a position, thus “owning” the issue – and positional issues –where parties take distinct positions. These specifications are provided by new quantitative and qualitative analyses of party manifestos for national elections, using the Comparative Agendas Project dataset. This will allow for a test of two main hypotheses: (1) the overall salience of environmental issues in party manifestos has generally increased, but depends on public opinion and parties’ internal divisions on this issue. (2) Inter-party conflict over the environment does occur, but is limited to selected emphasis of distinct environmental issues rather than direct confrontation, and is not one-dimensional.
