🏛 Climate change in parliament

This paper examines which ideological positions are associated with parties’ salience of climate change across countries and over time. Moving beyond positional accounts of party competition, it conceptualises climate salience as the outcome of strategic issue emphasis under ideological constraints. Building on salience theory and models of issue competition, the argument holds that parties are more likely to emphasise climate change when the issue aligns with their ideological core and less likely to do so when it exposes internal contradictions or conflicts with other ideological commitments. It further examines whether the ideological foundations of climate salience have strengthened over time and whether they vary across national contexts, particularly between Western and post-socialist European party systems. The analysis draws on party-level data from 27 European parliaments between 1990 and 2020, combining salience measures based on parliamentary speeches and manifestos with ideological indicators from manifesto data and expert surveys. Employing within–between panel models, the study distinguishes cross-sectional differences between parties from within-party changes over time, thereby assessing both stable ideological structuring and dynamic adjustments in climate salience as parties’ ideological profiles and the broader climate context evolve.