Green Rhetoric, Grey Realities? Do ‘Parties Matter’ for Climate Change Mitigation Policy?

Political parties are important actors in climate politics, not least in their potential to influence public policy. Do ‘parties matter’ for climate change policies? Findings on this question are mixed, and to date it has not been answered using data on parties’ climate change-specific preferences. Using a new data set on parties’ climate policy positions from the PARTYCLIM project, we examine how parties’ preferences influence governments’ climate policies. We exploit unique features of the PARTYCLIM data set, which covers more than 500 parties-at-election in 20 countries. We examine the role of climate change-specific policy positions (both pro- and anti-climate policy preferences), as well as the prevalence of specific policy commitments (policy proposals), ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ policies, and sectoral focus in shaping governments’ climate policies. We test the influence of parties’ preferences on a range of dependent variables, including policy outcomes (greenhouse gas emissions) and policy outputs (e.g., climate policy production, -density or -stringency).