From Average to Anti-Climate: Explaining Radical Right Party Position Shifts through Frame Profiles

Recent developments in many Western European democracies indicate that climate change has become an increasingly contested issue. One explanation is the adoption of anti-climate policy positions from radical right parties (RRP) coupled with their electoral success. RRP have shifted their position on climate policy from an approximately mainstream position to a clear anti-climate position in the last two decades. This striking example of a policy position shift is the focus of this study. Although there is a rich literature on when and why parties shift their positions, only scant evidence exists on how parties reposition. I explain the strategic communication when shifting position with novel concept of frame profiles. Extending the PARTYPRESS data set with party press releases from Switzerland and Italy, the empirical analysis is currently based on press releases from parties in 9 Western European countries (2010- 2025). To measure issue frames in RRP communication, I use a transfer learning approach and fine-tune a pre-trained transformer model to classify issue frames as well as an inductive LLM approach. The results will have important implications for research on party communication strategies and shed light on the role of parties in tackling climate change. While climate change is a global problem, national-level actors, such as political parties, remain crucial in the fight against it.