On 20th February 2025, the Political Studies Association (PSA) Environment Group and the PSA Elections, Public Opinion and Parties Group (EPOP) co-organised a one-day academic workshop on elections and climate change. This event was sponsored by Environmental Politics and supported by EPOP’s Anthony King Award. In this guest post, Charlotte Weatherill – who attended on behalf of the journal, reflects on the day with Mitya Pearson who organised the event with Ashley Dodsworth.
Elections and Climate Change was held at the University of Bristol in the very impressive Wills Memorial building. With 17 speakers, the day was split into four panels, in a hybrid format.
- Elections Around the World
- Climate Change and Political Parties
- Public Opinion on Climate Change
- Reasons to be Cheerful? Prospects for Climate Change Policy after the Year of Elections
Throughout the day, some themes emerged. Below, Mitya draws out some of those themes, and how the papers of the day spoke to them.
From ‘Climate Elections’ to ‘Greenlash’?
Whatever the metric used, the picture has shifted somewhat in recent years. In many of the countries which held elections during 2024 and early 2025 it is notable how the salience of climate change is lower than it was four or five years ago, and political parties’ positioning appears more divided on the issue too.
Matthew Paterson presented on the UK Labour Party’s election victory in 2024, and this case study illustrates the complicated political context surrounding climate policy in many countries. The victorious Labour Party offered ambitious climate policies during the election, with the Green Party coming second in many seats. However, in recent years ‘Net Zero Populism’ has threatened a previously fairly stable cross-party consensus on climate change in the UK, and the populist party Reform UK also came second in many constituencies at the 2024 election.
Clear Pattern to Party Politics of Climate Politics
Across many Western democracies in recent years there have been pretty clear patterns in terms of party approaches to climate change. Green and left parties tend to embrace ambitious climate policies, populist right radical parties are very hostile to climate policies, and centre right parties tend to sit somewhere in between.
Neil Carter’s paper detailed the new PARTYCLIM Dataset which is being developed by a team of researchers, and Marthe Walgrave presented on research into the framing of climate change in party manifestos at the 2024 European Elections. Juneseo Hwang’s presentation included an outline of parties’ climate position in the 2024 Korean general election.
Voter Attitudes to Climate Change
An underlying question during the workshop was the oft-discussed topic of what factors shape public opinion on climate change, and Sienna Everett presented on the impact of parenthood on climate concern.
Party identity and broader ideological perspectives have long been seen to shape climate attitudes. A division is often drawn between countries in terms of how polarised their politics is on climate change. Countries such as the United States and Australia have had much sharper divides, among both elites and voters, on climate change than many countries in Europe. It is notable that many European countries are seeing more polarised approaches to climate change among elites, and it remains an ongoing question as to how far this will drive greater voter-level polarisation on the issue. Nick Vivyan presented on how polarised public opinion on climate change is within the UK.
How Important is Environmental Voting?
Academics and campaigners have long highlighted how public concern, as shown in public opinion surveys, about climate change has been widespread within many countries for many years. There is a harder research question which is: to what extent are voters’ attitudes to climate change and political parties’ positions on this issue actually driving voting behaviour?
This is a puzzle which scholars are increasingly seeking to understand in a range of contexts, and Malo Jan and Conor Little presented different attempts to get at that question using survey experiments and election study data respectively. Charlotte Bez also presented on the impact that exposure to international trade has on green voting.
Popular Policy
We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it
Karolin Soontjens’ presentation on citizen and elite attitudes to climate change included a reference to this famous Jean-Claude Juncker quotation, and it was clear in the workshop that the electoral politics of climate policy design remains a fruitful area for research, which we need to understand better. Aidan Miao presented on the electoral effects of the Inflation Reduction Act, and Theodore Tallent explored the impact of symbolic climate policies on public attitudes.
The workshop had a strong European / Global North focus, however, and the situation is arguably quite different in other contexts. For example, a recent paper argued that China is able to enact unpopular climate policies, and even allow them to remain unpopular, as long as the government as a whole can retain support for its economic and political agenda. In that context, people’s political support and policy support can be separated. This actually chimes with another recent article, based on research in Sweden, that found that governments do not need to anticipate losing substantial support when implementing climate policies – at least in favourable conditions.
Which comes first: the support, the policy, the perceptions or the popularity?
A Conclusion from Charlotte.
There were moments in the day where the tensions between popularity, policy and politics became blurred for me as an IR scholar. At times I was wondering about the assumptions in the papers about the motivations of politicians. Mat Paterson’s mention of the Daily Mail brought this to the fore – are politicians trying to please the populace or keep the media on their side? In other words, are they trying to please the public at all? Where does power lie?
Soontjens’ paper mentioned that populations are more supportive of environmental policy and socially progressive policies in general than politicians think they are. Additionally, in countries with two dominant parties and a FPTP system that requires tactical voting, even elections aren’t moments where people’s views can be truly expressed. The UK Green Party’s long-term campaign for a different electoral system reflects this issue.
Some of these concerns also came up in questions at the end of the day – someone asked where social justice issues factored into in the discussions. Green policies don’t exist in a vacuum, and the ‘greenlash’ comes alongside backlash against all socially progressive politics. This question was appreciated by the final panel – Elisabetta Cornago, Katharina Richter, Adam Corner, and Ed Matthew – because it enabled the point to be made that climate change must also be understood as a justice issue.
Bios
Dr Mitya Pearson Mitya is an Assistant Professor in the Politics of Climate Change at the University of Warwick, and co-convenor of the PSA Environmental Politics Group. Mitya’s research focuses on various aspects of environmental politics in Britain and Europe.
Dr Ashley Dodsworth is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Bristol. Her research interests focus on the environmental political thought, particularly republican environmentalism, and the intersection with history of political thought more broadly, and also the pedagogy of environmental justice and climate change. She is the co-convenor of PSA Environmental Politics group
Dr Charlotte Weatherill is Social Media Editor for Environmental Politics. She is also a Lecturer in Politics & International Studies at The Open University and a co-founder and co-convenor of BISA’s Environment and Climate Politics working group. Charlotte’s research explores the concept of vulnerability in climate change politics, particularly in relation to Oceania and colonial discourses. Research interests include environmental and climate change politics, and theories of feminism, coloniality and racial capitalism.
