Political parties and climate policy

This study presents an innovative approach to hand-coding parties’ policy preferences in the relatively new, cross-sectoral field of climate change mitigation policy. It applies this approach to party manifestos in six countries, comparing the preferences of parties in Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy and the United Kingdom over the past two decades. It probes the data for evidence of validity through content validation and convergent/discriminant validation and engages with the debate on position-taking in environmental policy by developing a positional measure that incorporates ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ climate policy preferences. The analysis provides evidence for the validity of the new measures, shows that they are distinct from comparable measures of environmental policy preferences and argues that they are more comprehensive than existing climate policy measures. The new measures strengthen the basis for answering questions that are central to climate politics and to party politics. The approach developed here has important implications for the study of new, complex or cross-cutting policy issues and issues that include both valence and positional aspects.


Venstre
Tid for forandring. Note that climate policies may also include the enhancement of carbon sinks (e.g., wetlands).

Anti-climate policy quasi-sentences
These are pieces of text that indicate support for policies that, if implemented, would increase net greenhouse gas emissions or reduce carbon sinks. 4 These quasisentences may be statements that deny that climate change is a problem, general statements against policies that would reduce emissions (e.g., 'We should not give in to climate change alarmism') or (more commonly) they will be policy proposals that 2 'We specify net emission to exclude policies that simply shift emissions from one location [i.e., country] to another' (Compston and Bailey, 2013: 147 3. Likewise, general statements against regulation might cover regulatory climate policies and therefore should be coded as anti-climate policies. 4. The promotion of international tourism is coded as an anti-climate policy, although it is not identified by Compston and Bailey as such. We disregard tourism promotion that is explicitly domestic (non-international).

5.
Policies that might encourage population growth (e.g., subsidised childcare) are not counted as anti-climate policies (contra. Compston and Bailey). We would argue that they are too widely diffused in manifestos and the effects of individual policies are too marginal to be coded.
Other guidelines:  Some pieces of text (pro-and anti-climate policies) will require some further research to assess whether they would increase or reduce emissions. One example of this has been High Speed Rail in the UK (see Appendix to the A.10 coding instructions). You are welcome to submit similar notes with your coded data.
 Context (year and country) is important. Remember that we are examining whether text support policies that would increase (reduce) emissions in a specific context. For example, in an (hypothetical) energy system powered fully by coal, developing new nuclear capacity will clearly be a pro-climate policy; in an (hypothetical) energy system powered fully by renewables, developing new nuclear capacity would be an anti-climate policy.
 If in doubt, code the text as you think it should be coded, code it as 'hcode' (hard to code), enter a comment, and then discuss it with others in the project team.

Neutral or ambiguous quasi-sentences
Neutral quasi-sentences are not the same as quasi-sentences that are not sufficiently relevant to GHG emissions. A neutral (or ambiguous) quasi-sentence should be relevant to net GHG emissions, but its content should imply that net emissions would be maintained at current levels (e.g., by clearly displacing emissions nationally or internationally [see footnote on net emissions, above] or by including policies that both increase and reduce emissions).

Quasi-sentences that are not sufficiently relevant
These are quasi-sentences that are not sufficiently relevant to net greenhouse gas emissions to be coded as 1, 2 or 3 (e.g., 'We are committed to improving language education in schools'). We identify these quasi-sentences (so that we can count them) A.11 but we do not need to enter '4' in each instance (we can simply leave the cells blank for now).

Summary of variables
The key variables are as follows:  Year  Party.
 Qsno: Sequential numbers assigned to quasi-sentences. For the purposes of coding the manifestos, #1 and #2 are most important, as they reflected the available analysis at the time of the 2010 manifestos and they are the most authoritative sources. Note also that Greengauge is a pro-HS2 NGO. Therefore, I suggest coding high speed rail in the UK as ambiguous/neutral.

Online Appendix C. Coding subcategories.
These are the categories that we use in the coding scheme to describe individual pieces of text. They were developed inductively. Initially, coders gave the text a primary label and a secondary label if appropriate. Where more than one label applied, final decisions on the primary label were based on which category was primary in a quasi-sentence or (if that did not differentiate between the elements) which was mentioned first. The categories listed below were constructed by merging multiple logically coherent sub-categories.subcategories (i.e., labels). Coding is context-specific (i.e., the same policy proposal may have a different effect on GHG emissions in different countries or at different times). The descriptions below indicate content that is typically included (and not included) in the subcategories and, thus in the overall pro-climate and anti-climate categories.
An asterisk* indicates a subcategory that is excluded for the calculation of Core measures.

Pro-climate categories
Pro-environment. Pro-environment text that potentially includes climate policy.
Includes general statements in favour of environmental protection that may include the climate, pro-environmentalism, pro-sustainable development, pro-green growth, general criticisms of the government's environment policy that potentially include but are not specific to climate policy, pro-general environmental EU action that potentially includes climate change, pro-use of environmental indicators, pro-foreign environmental aid, pro-environmental taxation, sustainable tourism. measures. Opposition to subsidies for GHG-intensive agriculture (including pro-CAP reform statements). Pro-domestic consumption of local and national food. Includes policies for better provenance labelling but do not include international trade promotion of local produce. Does not include organic farming.

Anti-climate categories
Anti-environmental taxes. Includes text that is anti-environmental taxes, anti-carbon tax, anti-fuel tax, pro-lower carbon tax, opposition to increased environmental taxation or pro-additional exemptions to an environmental tax.