Party competition on climate policy: The roles of interest groups, ideology and challenger parties in the UK and Ireland
| DOI | 10.1177/0192512120972582 |
| Date | 01 January 2021 |
| Author | Conor Little,Neil Carter |
| Published date | 01 January 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0192512120972582
International Political Science Review
2021, Vol. 42(1) 1 –17
© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0192512120972582
journals.sagepub.com/home/ips
Party competition on climate
policy: The roles of interest groups,
ideology and challenger parties in
the UK and Ireland
Neil Carter
University of York, UK
Conor Little
University of Limerick, Ireland
Abstract
This study shows how interest group–party relations, parties’ cross-cutting policy preferences, and
competition with challenger parties shape the structure of issue competition on climate policy. It uses
the ‘most similar’ cases of the UK and Ireland to show how differences in party systems influence the
structure of issue competition. The study takes up the challenge of integrating salience and position in the
conceptualisation of climate policy preferences. Empirically, it provides new evidence on factors influencing
climate policy preferences and the party politics of climate change, focusing on interest groups, party
ideology, and challenger parties. Further, it identifies similarities between the general literature on interest
group influence on party preferences and the literature on interest groups in climate politics, and seeks to
make connections between them.
Keywords
Political parties, party competition, climate change, salience, polarisation, interest groups
Introduction
Climate change mitigation policy consists of issues within and across several sectors; it is also a
relatively recent arrival—since the 1990s—to domestic political agendas. Party preferences on
climate policy are shaped by factors ranging from public opinion and interest group demands to
party ideology and the nature of the party system. In the aggregate, these policy preferences
Corresponding author:
Neil Carter, Department of Politics, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD, UK.
Email: neil.carter@york.ac.uk
972582IPS0010.1177/0192512120972582International Political Science ReviewCarter and Little
research-article2020
Special Issue Article
2 International Political Science Review 42(1)
constitute a structure of issue competition, as parties accord greater or lesser priority to climate
policies, and take positions that are more or less polarised. The structure of issue competition on
climate policy has implications for efforts to mitigate climate change because it influences public
attitudes and public policy: polarisation among parties leads to polarisation among the public
(Birch, 2020); convergent climate politics is associated with climate policy ambition (Christoff and
Eckersley, 2011: 440; Farstad, 2019); and the priority (salience) of climate policy for parties is an
important condition for ambitious policy (Carter and Jacobs, 2014; Jensen and Spoon, 2011).
This study examines the UK and Ireland to assess the roles of interest groups, wider party ideol-
ogy (i.e. preferences that cut across climate policy preferences), and challenger parties in shaping
the structure of issue competition on climate policy. In conceptualising the structure of issue com-
petition, our point of departure is the observation that salience and position matter (Clarke et al.,
2009: 44; Stokes, 1963: 373). We develop a framework incorporating both concepts in four ideal-
typical structures of issue competition (Guinaudeau and Persico, 2014). In applying it, we show
that issue competition on climate policy differs in its structure between countries, and within coun-
tries over time and across climate policy issues.
To explain differences in the structure of issue competition on climate policy, we focus on two
countries that are similar in important respects and that differ in the structure of their party systems,
with implications for interest groups’ relations with parties, parties’ cross-cutting policy prefer-
ences, and competition on climate policy from challenger parties. We show that the structure of
issue competition on climate policy has been influenced by interest groups’ interaction with the
party system; this speaks to recent studies within and beyond comparative climate politics
(Mildenberger, 2020; Otjes and Rasmussen, 2017). We also find that parties are constrained by
policy preferences that cut across climate policy and by the incentive to accommodate successful
challengers on climate policy. Thus, interest groups, ideology and challenger parties each play
important and often mutually reinforcing roles in influencing the structure of competition on cli-
mate policy.
The study makes several contributions. First, while existing scholarship tends to assume that
competition and party preferences on climate policy are either a matter of salience (priority) or
position, we show that there are varieties of issue competition both between and within countries.
Second, it makes broader contributions to the literature on party preferences, especially by using a
comparative case study to focus on lesser-studied influences: interest groups (Klüver, 2020; Otjes
and Green-Pedersen, 2019) and party ideology (e.g. Meyer, 2013). It identifies affinities between
important arguments in comparative climate politics (e.g. Mildenberger, 2020) and interest group–
party relations (Otjes and Rasmussen, 2017), and provides evidence to support the idea that insti-
tutional conditions moderate interest group influence on party preferences. Third, it contributes to
the emerging body of research on the party politics of climate change (Båtstrand, 2014; Carter
et al., 2018; Farstad, 2018, 2019; Ladrech and Little, 2019; Leiren et al., 2020; Marcinkiewicz and
Tosun, 2015) with these findings on interest group influence, and by showing how cross-cutting
preferences constrain parties and how challengers drive accommodative policy changes.
Structures of issue competition on climate policy
There are divergent assumptions and positions about whether environmental policy—of which
climate policy is a subset—is a positional or valence issue. Studies of political competition on
the environment in European democracies often identify it as an archetypal valence issue,
characterised by consensus about the goal of environmental protection and competition over
parties’ performance or perceived competence (Clarke et al., 2009). This is reflected
To continue reading
Request your trial