💬 Parties Talking Climate

How has climate politics become embedded in existing ideological conflicts? This paper examines how parties across Europe have politicised and framed climate change issues over the past three decades. Applying a transformer-based classifier and multilingual topic models to parliamentary speeches from 27 European countries (1990-2020), the study traces how parties link climate change to broader political agendas and ideological profiles. By identifying and analysing climate-related sentences and speeches, I explore which dimensions, such as energy policy and transition, economic competitiveness, social justice, or international cooperation, parties emphasize when addressing climate change policy. The analysis highlights systematic differences between left- and right-wing parties, but also reveals considerable variation within parties over time, as climate change has shifted from a marginal to a mainstream political issue. Panel analyses link these discursive shifts to changes in party competition and policy context, showing how climate politics have become embedded in existing ideological conflicts. The paper contributes to understanding the political structuring of climate change and the evolving role of parties in shaping Europe’s climate discourse.