Wi Check for updates Original Article Going Against the Grain: Climate Change as a Wedge Issue for the Radical Right Comparative Political Studies 2024, Vol. 0(0) 1-27 © The Author(s) 2024 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1 177/00104140241271297 journals.sagepub.com/home/cps SSage Zachary P. Dickson1 and Sara B. Hobolt1 Abstract Political parties often mobilise issues that can improve their electoral fortunes by splitting existing coalitions. We argue that by adopting a distinctively adversarial stance, radical right-wing parties have increasingly politicised climate change policies as a wedge issue. This strategy challenges the mainstream party consensus and seeks to mobilise voter concerns over green initiatives. Relying on state-of-the-art multilingual large language models, we empirically examine nearly half a million press releases from 76 political parties across nine European democracies to support this argument. Our findings demonstrate that the radical right's oppositional climate policy rhetoric diverges significantly from the mainstream consensus. Survey data further reveal climate policy scepticism among voters across the political spectrum, highlighting the mobilising potential of climate policies as a wedge issue. This research advances our understanding of issue competition and the politicisation of climate change. Keywords radical right, party competition, wedge issue, climate change, large language models London School of Economics, London, UK Corresponding Author: Sara B. Hobolt, Department of Government, London School of Economics, Houghton St, London, London, UK. Email: s.b.hobolt@lse.ac.uk Data Availability Statement included at the end of the article. 2 Comparative Political Studies 0(0) Introduction Challenger parties, such as radical right and green parties, are typically 'issue entrepreneurs' that seek to politicise new issues to expand their voting appeal (Abou-Chadi, 2016; Adams et al., 2006; De Vries & Hobolt, 2020; Meguid, 2005). This strategy is particularly successful when they politicise so-called 'wedge issues' - issues that cut across party lines and threaten to spark intra-party or intra-coalition divisions (Haas et al., 2023; Heinkelmann-Wild et al., 2020; Hillygus & Shields, 2009; Hobolt & de Vries, 2015; Jeong et al, 2011; van de Wardt et al., 2014). Prime examples of wedge issue competition include the mobilisation of immigration by the radical right (Green-Pedersen, 2019; Gessler & Hunger, 2022; Hutter & Kriesi, 2022; Meijers & van der Veer, 2019) and the mobilisation of the environmental issue by green parties (Grant & Tilley, 2019; Spoon, 2011; Spoon et al., 2014). Yet, despite important scholarly contributions, the ways in which challenger parties adopt new wedge issues to broaden their electoral appeal in the context of dynamic issue entrepreneurship is less explored. In this article, we document the politicisation of climate change policies by radical right-wing parties across Europe. We examine the extent to which these parties leverage climate change policies to expand their appeal by adopting an adversarial position on related green policy initiatives. Moreover, we present evidence that suggests that the radical right's mobilisation of climate change has all the hallmarks of a classic wedge issue. Namely, that mainstream political parties are largely in agreement that even costly climate policies are necessary, while a proportion of voters across the political spectrum remain sceptical of the costs involved with reducing carbon emissions and fossil fuel dependence. We argue that the radical right in Europe has shifted its strategy from largely ignoring the climate policy issue to politicising climate change as a potential wedge issue by taking advantage of the broad consensus among mainstream parties and a growing disquiet among some voters. To test this argument, we leverage a unique dataset of party press releases from 76 political parties across nine Western European countries that span the years from 2010 to 2023. This dataset builds on and expands the PARTY-PRESS dataset created by Erfort et al. (2023) which includes nearly 400,000 full press releases - over 50,000 of which are from radical right-wing parties. The distinct advantage of the party press releases is that they allow for capturing party issue competition unfiltered by institutional constraints. Additionally, the press releases capture the dynamic attention and issue positions of parties over time rather than solely during election periods as with party manifestos. Our analysis draws on recent advances in deep learning and computational methods to descriptively analyse the press releases. We train, validate and Dickson and Hobolt 3 make public two multilingual large language models (LLMs), one of which classifies party press releases according to the 21 issue categories defined by the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) (CAP, 2023), and the other of which is a generative model that summarises the primary policy objectives in a given press releases and identifies the party's position on the policy. We use these models to analyse the press releases and ultimately to measure party salience and party positions on climate change-related policies. Our findings illustrate that radical right parties are not only emphasising climate change-related issues more than they did in the past, but that their positions on climate change policies have significantly diverged from the mainstream pro-climate change consensus adopted by other party families. Further, we examine the mobilising potential of this 'climate policy sceptic' strategy among voters, leveraging high-quality survey data from the countries studied throughout the analysis. We find that nearly every mainstream party family has significant proportions of voters who express scepticism of climate policies, thus positioning climate policy as a true wedge issue that does not align neatly with the left-right party divide (De Vries & Hobolt, 2020; Kriesi et al., 2006). Narrowing the focus to the British and German context, we then show that the radical right receives the vast majority of its support from climate policy sceptics. Finally, we analyse panel data from the British case to show that a significant proportion of the radical right's support in 2023 comes from climate policy sceptics who supported the Conservative Party in 2020, which further highlights the mobilising potential of this strategy. Our paper thus contributes to the literature on party competition by illustrating the potential for parties to engage in wedge issue mobilisation through the adoption of an adversarial position when widespread consensus exists across mainstream parties on an issue. Furthermore, our study demonstrates the dynamic nature of wedge issue competition, where challenger parties seek to expand their appeal by mobilising new wedge issues. The findings also have wider implications for the literature on responses to climate change as they point to a future of growing politicisation of the issue, as the policies to tackle climate change come at an increasing cost to voters and the radical right seizes the opportunity to mobilise opposition to these policies for electoral gain. Wedge Issue Competition and Climate Change It is well-established that parties can increase their appeal to voters by drawing attention to issues on which they are seen as particularly competent (issue ownership strategy) or by emphasising issues that have otherwise received limited attention by existing coalitions (issue entrepreneur ship) (Budge & Farlie, 1983; De Vries & Hobolt, 2020; Green-Pedersen, 2007, 4 Comparative Political Studies 0(0) 2019; Green-Pedersen & Mortensen, 2015; Petrocik, 1996; Riker, 1986). By strategically emphasising an issue, political parties can increase its salience, inducing voters to weigh the issue more heavily in their electoral calculus, all while reducing the salience of issues that are less favourable to the party (Belanger & Meguid, 2008; Hobolt & de Vries, 2015). Challenger parties, in particular, often seek to mobilise so-called 'wedge issues' to broaden their electoral appeal and to undermine the popularity of their opponents. As Schattschneider noted more than 60 years ago, "the effort in all political struggles is to exploit cracks in the opposition while attempting to consolidate one's own side" (Schattschneider, 1960, pp. 69-70). A common challenger party strategy is thus to split the opposition using wedge issues in search of new voters (Jeong et al., 2011). There are two key characteristics of wedge issues. First, such issues cannot easily be subsumed by the dominant dimension of contestation in a party system. In other words, a representational deficit exists when it comes to the issue or a position on the issue. Second, a wedge issue has the potential to bring about rifts in party platforms that can destabilise another party or a coalition of parties. Wedge issues therefore provide political opportunities for challenger parties, as they exploit divisions within mainstream parties or coalitions to gain voter support (Heinkelmann-Wild et al, 2020; Hillygus & Shields, 2009; Jeong et al., 2011; van de Wardt et al, 2014). The literature on multi-party competition has shown that challenger parties are more likely to mobilise wedge issues that can split existing coalitions of parties and partisans (van de Wardt et al., 2014), whereas mainstream parties tend to emphasise issues that they own and that are aligned with the dominant economic dimension of contestation (De Vries & Hobolt, 2020; Meguid, 2005, 2008). For instance, van de Wardt et al. (2014) demonstrate that challenger parties that have never formed part of government are more likely to mobilise the wedge issue of European integration. De Vries and Hobolt (2020) show that this also applies to other wedge issues, such as the environment and immigration. There are numerous studies demonstrating that the environment is typically mobilised by green parties (Abou-Chadi & Kayser, 2017; Farstad, 2018; Grant & Tilley, 2019; Kriesi et al., 2006; Spoon, 2011; Spoon et al., 2014), while immigration has been successfully politicised by the radical right for decades (Mudde, 2007; Rydgren, 2008; Gessler & Hunger, 2022; Hutter & Kriesi, 2022; Meijers & van der Veer, 2019). We build on and expand this literature by examining a specific type of wedge issue competition, namely where a party politicises an issue that is already 'owned' by other parties by adopting a distinct position on the issue. Typically, the literature on issue ownership and issue competition in Europe has focused on the salience of issues, arguing that parties mobilise issues through strategic emphasis, thus appearing attentive and increasing the salience of the issue in the minds of voters (Budge & Farlie, 1983; Dickson and Hobolt 5 Green-Pedersen, 2019; Petrocik, 1996). However, wedge issue competition is about 'driving a wedge' between existing coalitions by adopting a distinct position that appeals to voters, not merely through greater emphasis and attention (Jeong et al., 2011; Koedam, 2022; Meguid, 2008). Hence, wedge issue competition is necessarily about both emphasis and positioning. In the American context, previous studies have shown that Republicans have historically adopted an adversarial position on issues not aligned with the dominant economic liberal-conservative dimension, such as race. US Republicans used race as a wedge issue to split the Democratic Party, whose supporters were economically liberal but had conflicting preferences on social issues like race (Jeong et al, 2011; Miller & Schofield, 2003; Riker, 1986). Similarly, in a European context, challenger parties have politicised European integration by adopting a distinctly Eurosceptic position in the face of a mainstream pro-European consensus, appealing to voters who were also sceptical of further European integration (Heinkelmann-Wild et al., 2020; Hobolt & de Vries, 2015; Hooghe & Marks, 2009; Kriesi, 2016; van de Wardt et al., 2014). Another common adversarial strategy of the radical right is on the issue of immigration, where these parties adopted a hard-line policy position on immigration earlier than many mainstream parties. Indeed, the success of the radical right in recent decades in Europe has been attributed in large part to its appeal to the anti-immigration sentiment of voters who are found across the political spectrum (Lucassen & Lubbers, 2012; Rydgren, 2008; Van der Brug & Fennema, 2007). We argue that a similar adversarial strategy can be successfully adopted, even when an issue is already 'owned' by another party family. An example of such an issue is the environment and climate change. A quintessential green party issue, the environment has grown in salience in recent years, in part due to the mobilising effort of the green party movement, but also due to the increasingly visible threat of climate change and policies adopted to respond to this threat (Abou-Chadi, 2016; Crawley et al., 2020; McAllister & bin Oslan, 2021). The growing policy activity in this area, including high-profile initiatives such as the European Green Deal and domestic carbon reduction policies that are costly to consumers, has heightened the potential for a public backlash, and thus presents mobilising opportunities for an adversarial party strategy. While most of the literature on issue strategies of the radical right has focused on these parties' anti-immigration, nationalist or social conservative agenda (Mudde, 2007; Rydgren, 2008; Gessler & Hunger, 2022; Hutter & Kriesi, 2022; Meijers & van der Veer, 2019), there is a small but burgeoning literature on the radical right's position on the environment (Bohmelt, 2021; Forchtner, 2019; Forchtner & Kolvraa, 2015; Forchtner & Lubarda, 2022; Huber et al, 2021; Schaller & Carius, 2019; Schworer & Fernandez-Garcia, 6 Comparative Political Studies 0(0) 2023). For example, Forchtner and Lubarda (2022) analyse the contributions of far-right Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) on the issue of climate change and conclude that radical right MEPs do not generally deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change, but they are critical of the ways in which climate change is addressed. Similarly, Schworer and Fernandez-Garcia (2023) analyse the positions of populist radical right-wing parties on climate change using party manifestos from 10 West European countries. The authors find that while these parties are divided, they are generally less likely to speak out in favour of climate protection than other parties. A number of these studies have also sought to explain how features of the ideology of the radical right - such as populism and nationalism - have shaped their position on climate change (Bohmelt, 2021; Forchtner, 2019; Kulin et al., 2021; Lockwood, 2018; Schworer & Fernandez-Garcia, 2023). The climate change issue is often considered as part of the cultural axis of party competition (Hooghe & Marks, 2018; Kriesi et al., 2006), yet policies to combat climate change also have distributional consequences (Bolet et al., 2023), which allows the radical right to mobilise in opposition by appealing both to cultural (e.g. 'anti-woke') sentiments as well as concerns about the economic costs of the policy responses. We aim to contribute to this literature by developing and testing a more general party competition argument about how challenger parties can strategically leverage climate change as a wedge issue to expand their voter appeal by pushing back against the mainstream consensus. Building on the theory of wedge issue competition, we argue that the radical right has recently adopted a wedge issue strategy and politicised the already salient issue of climate change by adopting an adversarial position. In line with the wedge issue competition argument, we stipulate that such a strategy has three essential components: (1) an increase in issue emphasis, (2) an adversarial position distinct from other parties and finally, (3) a mobilising potential, which is demonstrated by a subset of voters who share the party's position on the issue and whose preferences are not already represented by mainstream parties. This argument is thus based on the following core assumptions. First, we assume that in order for a party to strategically advance a wedge issue strategy, that party seeks to increase the salience of the issue. Second, an adversarial wedge issue strategy implies that a party offers a position on the issue that is distinct from other parties. Third, for this strategy to be successful, there must be a sizable proportion of the electorate that shares the party's position on the issue, since a wedge issue strategy is only advantageous to the extent that it attracts new voters. Finally, a successful wedge issue strategy should not risk a split among a party's own base, and hence any adversarial position should have broad-based support among a parly's existing supporters. In the remainder of the paper, we demonstrate empirically how radical right-wing parties in Europe have engaged in such an adversarial wedge issue Dickson and Hobolt 7 strategy on the issue of climate change policies, and how this strategy has the potential to mobilise climate policy sceptic voters who have traditionally supported mainstream parties. Data and Research Design We examine the ways in which radical right-wing parties engage with climate change policies by analysing party press releases circulated directly from the party organisations. Party press releases present an excellent opportunity to further understand policy attention and the positions of political parties for several reasons. First, party press releases represent the organic attention and positions of parties without the influence of institutional constraints. Second, press releases are published throughout the election cycle, allowing for a dynamic understanding of the evolution of issue competition over time. Other sources of text used in previous studies, such as parliamentary speeches or party manifestos, are in contrast more limited in capacity to capture the dynamic and organic dimensions of issue competition realised by relying on party press releases. We focus on parties in nine Western European countries, representing countries with a mix of stronger and weaker and well-established and newer radical right-wing parties. While most of these countries have a form of proportional representation - making it easier for challenger parties to compete (De Vries & Hobolt, 2020) - we also include the UK in our case selection (and for further analysis) as an example of a majoritarian electoral system. Our cases are thus broadly representative of Western Europe. Moreover, this selection of cases allows us to use and extend press releases that from the comprehensive PARTYPRESS Database (Erfort et al., 2023), which includes press releases from 68 political parties in nine Western European countries, spanning the years from 2010 to 2020. We build on this data by further extending the collection of the press releases to include 2020-2023 and by collecting press releases from radical right-wing parties in Spain, Italy and Switzerland. Once combined with the original PARTYPRESS database, we classify the parties according to party family classifications made by ParlGov (Döring & Manow, 2012). The full list of parties and the number of press releases collected for each party is available in Supplemental Materials D, and we present descriptive statistics for the 13 radical right-wing parties used throughout the analysis in Table l.1 Salience The first part of our analysis focuses on the salience aspect of wedge issue competition. We seek to understand the degree to which climate change has increased in salience for radical right-wing parties. For this, we measure the 8 Comparative Political Studies 0(0) Table I. Radical Right-Wing Political Parties. Country Party Name Party Coverage Press Releases Austria Alliance for the future of Austria BZÖ 2019-2022 1 10 Austria Freedom party of Austria FPÖ 2010-2022 37,452 Denmark Danish People's party DF 2010-2022 636 Denmark New right NB 2015-2022 494 Germany Alternative for Germany AfD 2013-2022 3952 Italy Brothers of Italy Fdl 2012-2022 1773 Italy League Lega 2018-2022 153 Netherlands Forum for democracy FVD 2017-2022 135 Netherlands Party for freedom PVV 2010-2022 2009 Spain Voice VOX 2020-2022 650 Sweden Sweden democrats SD 2010-2022 1 191 Switzerland Swiss People's party SVP 2010-2022 1381 UK United Kingdom independence UKIP 2010-2022 2775 party Total 13 — — 52,71 1 amount of attention devoted to climate-related issues in the parties' press releases. To measure attention, we classified each of the press releases according to the primary issues it addressed. This presented a specific challenge as there is no common language among the European countries we study. We therefore relied on a pre-trained multilingual large language model, which we fine-tuned to predict the corresponding issue of each press release. Our base language model was a BERT multilingual model based on the transformers architecture (Devlin et al., 2019). We then fine-tuned the model on over 100k previously-annotated political documents in each of the languages of the parties in our analysis. This considerable undertaking would not have been possible without the public availability of annotated documents provided by the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP 2023). We therefore take a transfer-learning approach (Laurer et al., 2024) by first training our model on the annotated documents from the Comparative Agendas Project, which includes bills, laws, newspaper articles and other political documents that have been previously annotated according to the 21 issue categories, and then using the trained model for inference on the party press releases. Our classification scheme therefore follows the issue categories defined by the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP, 2023), which are intended to capture the various agendas of political actors. Our transfer learning approach was particularly effective. With a weighted average Fl score of 0.85, our model outperforms alternative methods of issue Dickson and Hobolt 9 classification such as dictionary methods in terms of accuracy (Gessler & Hunger, 2022). Full details of the training data used, as well as the optimised hyperparameters and validation of the model, are available in Supplemental Materials A.4 After classifying each press release, we measured the salience of climate change for radical right-wing parties as a proportion of the total number of press releases issued. These "attention proportions" are made at monthly time intervals. This process allows us to compare the levels of attention a given party family designates to climate-related issues while taking into consideration differences in the frequency with which different parties distribute press releases. Measuring attention as a proportion is important both empirically and theoretically because attention to a given issue must always be a subset of attention to all issues (Baumgartner & Jones, 2010). Attention to the environment by radical right-wing parties is presented in Figure 1. The figure suggests that radical right-wing parties have mostly lagged other party families over the last decade. However, a shift occurred around the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in which parties reduced their attention to the environment, re-directing to COVID-19 related matters. Following the pandemic, however, parties re-adjusted their focus on climate. Emerging from the pandemic, radical right-wing parties appear to outpace the other party families (except Green/Ecologist parties) in producing press releases in which climate change and environmental issues are a key focus. At the end of 2023, nearly 1 in 6 press releases from radical right-wing parties