What explains variation in parties’ climate change salience?

Abstract

The article explains the variation of climate change salience in party manifestos, examining the effects of party characteristics. Creating a novel measure of parties’ climate change salience based on Comparative Manifesto Project data, the article finds that parties have broadly not made climate change a salient issue, though significant differences remain. Left–right ideology significantly helps explain these differences and is more important than any other party characteristic in explaining the variation. This underlines the importance of ideology over economic and policy preferences, size and strategic incentives and incumbency constraints and points towards the partisan (as opposed to the valence) nature of the climate change issue. These results contrast to those of an identical analysis of environmental salience where ideology is found to have no effect, underlining how the two issues should be treated differently and lending further support to the argument that climate change is not a valence issue.