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The version of record of this manuscript has been published and is available in Party
Politics. Copyright © 2025. DOI: [https://doi.org/10.1177/13540688251347882].
This Land is Our Land:
Radical Right Parties and the Environmental Issue in Europe
Alex Honeker, Department of Political Science, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA
Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1642-496X
Jae-Jae Spoon, Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4722-7400
Abstract
Recent research has demonstrated that non-mainstream parties are expanding their issue
emphasis beyond their owned issues. In this article, we expand this research to understand
radical right parties’ environmental issue emphasis and what explains this increasing emphasis.
We argue that radical right parties engage in a two-pronged strategy of responsiveness and
differentiation on the environment. In response to green parties’ and the public’s increase in
environmental salience and green parties’ polling success, radical right parties increase their
emphasis on both the environment more generally and on environmental chauvinism, a
particular nationalist brand of environmentalism. We demonstrate this using Twitter/X data from
radical right parties in Western Europe from 2019-2021. These findings have important
implications for understanding issue evolution and party competition in the changing party
systems of Europe.
Author biographies:
Alex Honeker is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Clemson University. His research lies
at the intersection of party politics, political behavior, and international political economy. His work has
been published in the Review of International Political Economy and Foreign Policy Analysis.
Jae-Jae Spoon is Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work
focuses on electoral politics with an emphasis on party behavior. Her work has been published in the
Journal of Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, and the European Journal of Political Research, among
others.
Acknowledgements: We thank Kim Twist, Diane Bolet, and other conference and workshop participants
at the European Union Studies Association Annual Meeting and the University of Pittsburgh's “Changing
Voters, Changing Parties: Re-Defining the Electoral Landscape in Europe Conference,” and the
reviewers. All errors remain our own.
1
"We are carrying out the only real ecological project, to produce as much as possible in France what
we consume in France." –Marine Le Pen, Rassemblement National leader, April 2, 2017.
1
"A conservative environmental policy is based on one's own local environment, the love for one's
own home." –Henrik Vinge, Sverigedemokraterna’s Riksdag leader, March 19, 2019.
2
The political landscape is changing in Europe. Not only are mainstream parties struggling to
attract voters, in some countries the traditional mainstream parties are all but non-existent or
struggling. In the most recent presidential election in France, for example, the mainstream
Gaullist and Socialist parties together won 6.5% of the vote. In Italy, the largest party is the Fratelli
d’Italia, a party which is just under a decade old. And in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ Partij
voor de Vrijheid won the most seats in the 2023 elections and is currently part of the governing
coalition. Parties, moreover, are expanding their issue focus beyond their owned issues. We are
seeing, for example, green and radical right parties talking more about the economy. In her recent
campaign for the French presidency, the radical right Rassemblement National’s Marine Le Pen, for
example, focused on purchasing power and cost of living issues instead of immigration, as would
be expected from a radical right party. Recent research (Spoon and Williams 2021, 2023; Meguid
2023) has demonstrated that non-mainstream parties expand their issues and compete on non-
owned issues. Indeed, Williams and Spoon (2023) have shown that when public salience on the
environment is high, both radical right and radical left parties devote more of their manifestos to
environmental issues. Bergman and Flatt (2020, 723), moreover, find that far right parties can
increase their vote share by “broadening their issue profile” in large party systems. But we do not
yet have a good grasp of what radical right environmentalism looks like nor the full picture of
what predicts radical right emphasis on the issue.
It is to these questions that we turn to in this article. Moving beyond campaign manifestos, we
are interested in how radical right parties and their leaders directly engage with the public on the
issue of the environment. We examine 43,949 tweets from six West European radical right parties
1
Twitter/X (2017) https://twitter.com/MLP_officiel/status/848534420395085825
2
Twitter/X (2019) https://twitter.com/Samtidens/status/1107948996121841664
2
and 12,892 tweets from five green parties from January 2019 to February 2021. We argue that the
parties engage in both responsiveness and differentiation strategies in relation to the green
party’s and the public’s issue emphasis and green party electoral success by increasing both the
salience of the environment more generally and of environmental chauvinism (see Spoon and
Williams 2023), which is either support or opposition to particular environmental policies
because they either benefit or hurt the native population.
The article proceeds as follows. In the next section, we introduce the concept of environmental
chauvinism. We then develop our hypotheses which explain when radical right parties
emphasize the environment and environmental chauvinism. Next, we discuss our data and
methods and present our results. We find that radical right parties increase their emphasis on the
environment in response to increasing green party and public environmental salience and when
green parties’ electoral fortunes are on the rise. They increase their emphasis on environmental
chauvinism in response to public interest and when green parties are performing better in the
polls. The final section concludes and discusses the implications for understanding issue
evolution and party competition in the changing party systems of Europe.
Radical Right Environmentalism
The environment has traditionally been an issue owned by the left and in particular green parties.
Although green parties have typically been the associative issue owners of the environmental
issue (Walgrave et al 2012), mainstream parties have become increasingly focused on the issue
(Carter 2013; Spoon et al 2014), though not without critiques from the issue owners themselves
(see Spoon 2011, 10). For parties on the left, an environmental agenda typically focuses on
protection of the environment for the sake of the environment. In other words, protection of the
environment holds intrinsic value. Environmental policies are, however, increasingly connected
with economic policies, such as the European Green Deal which ensures both no net greenhouse
gas emissions by 2050 and “economic growth decoupled from resource use” (European
Commission 2021).
3
The radical right is also not a stranger to environmental issues. The protection of nature and the
national landscape has long been associated with radical right ideologies such as National
Socialism (Brüggemeier et al 2005; Voss 2014). Recent research has examined the discourse of the
radical right on the environment (Forchtner 2020) and found both that radical right parties are
supportive of environmental protection, though often for instrumental reasons (see Tosun and
Debus 2020), and skeptical of policies which seek to lessen the effects and potential impact of
climate change (Forchtner & Kølvraa, 2015; Forchtner 2018; Forchtner 2019; Küppers 2022).
Otteni and Weisskircher (2022), for example, found that an increase in wind turbines benefited
both the Greens and the radical right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party. As the number of
wind turbines in the municipality increased, the AfD benefited in both regional and local elections
by mobilizing against global warming policies. Relatedly, French presidential candidate Marine
Le Pen’s energy plan would have blocked renewable energy and wind turbines in particular. Her
plan included “a moratorium on wind and solar power” (Le Pen 2022). And most recently,
radical right parties in their campaigns for the European Parliament elections have opposed the
European Green Deal and the EU’s climate policy, more generally (Teng 2024).
Similarly, many radical right parties have used environmental rhetoric to oppose globalization.
For instance, Marine Le Pen’s platform emphasizes “economic patriotism” and “localism” in
opposition to “environmentally damaging” free trade agreements (Rassemblement National 2015).
Moreover, the marriage of environmental rhetoric and protectionist policy goes beyond Le Pen.
Radical right parties like the AfD, Italy’s Lega, Austria’s Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ) and
Belgium’s Vlaams Belang (VB) have also opposed free trade agreements like CETA, TTIP, and EU-
Mercosur on environmental grounds.
3
While the extant research has established that the radical
right does indeed discuss environmental issues, we know little about what predicts when they
do. It is to this question which we now turn.
3
See for example: https://twitter.com/vlbelang/status/1364844795798126594
4
One of the central tenets of many European radical right parties is that of welfare chauvinism, or
the notion that only certain groups should benefit from welfare benefits, particularly those who
are members of the native population and not the immigrant population (see Ennser-Jedenastik
2018). Returning to Le Pen’s recent manifesto, one of her central policies, for example, is ensuring
that only the French (i.e. native French) receive social aid. Building on work by Spoon and
Williams (2023), we use the term environmental chauvinism to denote either support or opposition
to particular environmental policies because they either benefit or hurt the native population.
This would include, for example, supporting policies to reduce air pollution to protect the beauty
of the natural heritage of the country as well as opposing policies that would subsidize solar or
wind power initiatives as the infrastructure they support (i.e. wind turbines or solar panels)
would harm the natural beauty of the country. Interestingly, although the implicit justification
for the policies is that they would benefit or harm the natural beauty of the country for the native
population, they would also in some cases benefit or harm the immigrant population as well.
4
Thus, radical right parties have put their brand on environmentalism (Aldrich 1995; Cox 1997;
Lupu 2013; Avina 2024) and are acting as issue entrepreneurs (de Vries and Hobolt 2020).
We know from a range of research that parties compete on different issues and that party
competition is centered around issue competition (e.g. Downs 1957; Hibbs 1977; Damore 2004;
Green-Pedersen 2007; Green and Hobolt 2007; Egan 2013). Parties typically compete for votes on
their owned issues (Budge and Farlie 1983; Petrocik 1996; Dolezal et al. 2013; Walgrave et al. 2015).
However, although owned issues are generally stable (Seeberg 2017)—the social democrats have
typically focused on employment and welfare, while conservatives and Christian Democrats’
focus has been on taxes and law and order—recent research has begun to point to the fact that
parties expand not only the issues they discuss (Spoon and Williams 2023), but may in fact be
4
It is important to note that what may appear to be anti-environmental positions on the part of radical right
parties, may not be necessarily viewed as such by voters. A recent study by Colantone et al (2024), for
example, finds that those who live in a zone in Milan where a ban on polluting cars was implemented were
more likely to vote for the far right Lega party as well as switch to Lega. However, owning a banned car did
not make residents any less pro-environmental in terms of attitudes or behavior.
5
expanding their issue ownership. It is to this question that we now turn in the context of the
radical right and the environmental issue.
Predicting Environmental Salience: Responsiveness and Differentiation
In multi-party systems, parties need to pursue at least two simultaneous strategies to maximize
their votes (Downs 1957). First, like in all systems, they are responsive to voters. When voters
care about an issue, parties in turn listen to the preferences of voters. This is often referred to
‘riding the wave’, i.e. when voters change their priorities, parties respond by changing their issue
emphasis (Ansolabehere and Iyengar 1994). The degree of responsiveness, however, varies across
party size, type, and governing status. Research has found, for example, that large parties tend to
be more responsive to public priorities; whereas governing parties are less responsive (Ezrow
and Hellwig 2014; Klüver and Spoon 2016;). Niche parties, conversely, typically only respond to
their own voters on their own issues (Ezrow et al 2011; Klüver and Spoon 2016). In addition to
responding to voters, parties also respond to the preferences of other parties. Meguid (2005) has
developed a three-prong framework for understanding the options available to parties in
responding to other parties positions—they can adopt the party’s position, take an opposing
position, or ignore it entirely, what she has referred to as the accommodative, adversarial, and
dismissive strategies, respectively. Research, particularly on mainstream responsiveness to niche
or challenger parties, has debated which of these strategies is best for electoral success (see e.g.
Abou-Chadi 2016; Bale 2003; Bale et al 2010; Cohen 2018.) Finally, parties can also respond to the
fulfillment of their policy goals. Meguid (2023), for example, finds that regionalist parties update
their programmatic strategy in response to decentralization reforms by expanding their issue
portfolio.
Second, parties in multi-party systems need to differentiate themselves from their competitors,
what Downs (1957, 141) refers to as “product differentiation.” Research has demonstrated that
when mainstream parties, for example, converge on the median voter, voters look for other
alternatives (Spoon and Klüver 2019; Grant and Tilley 2023). Kitschelt (1995) found that radical
6
right parties benefit as established parties became more similar. Other research has shown that
parties benefit from taking non-centrist positions (Adams and Merrill 1999; Adams 1999). Cox
(1990) and Kitschelt (1994), moreover, find that a party’s ability to distinguish itself in a
fragmented system is key for electoral success. Henceroth and Jensen (2018), for example, find
that regionalist parties benefit electorally when they differentiate themselves from their
mainstream competitor.
Taking the strategies of responsiveness and differentiation as the starting point, how do radical
right parties behave when confronted with the rising issue salience of a non-owned issue? Spoon
et al (2014) provide a useful framework for understanding when parties increase their emphasis
on the environment. They argue that a combination of threat and opportunity explain when parties
expand their issue focus. They define threat as increasing electoral support for the green party
(the issue owner) and opportunity as increasing public salience on the environmental issue.
Subsequent work that examines issue expansion has also found support for threat or opportunity
or both. Spoon and Williams (2021), for example, find that when unemployment (a threat)
increases, for example, green parties are more likely to emphasize economic issues. Spoon and
Williams (2023) furthermore demonstrate that when public salience is high (an opportunity), both
the radical right and radical left will increase their emphasis on the environment.
Although radical right parties are importantly not directly competing with the greens for the
same voters, when green parties increase their emphasis on the environment, radical right parties
will take this as an opportunity to respond, but also differentiate themselves given their agenda
of environmental chauvinism. Thus, we argue that radical right parties engage in a two-pronged
strategy of responsiveness and differentiation on the environmental issue. They are responding
to the increasing emphasis of the public and green parties on the issue, but they are also
importantly differentiating themselves. One could argue that they are following a modified
accommodation strategy (Meguid 2005), as they are accommodating the issue of the issue owner,
by increasing the issue focus, but they are not taking the position of the issue owner. Arguably,
7
they could be engaging simultaneously in an adversarial strategy, depending on how they
discuss the issue. Our first hypotheses are thus:
H1a: As the greens’ environment salience increases, the radical right’s environment salience
increases.
H1b: As the greens’ environment salience increases, the radical right’s environmental chauvinism
salience increases.
The radical right may find another opportunity in an electoral threat to respond and differentiate.
Again, as the radical right is not directly competing with the greens for the same voters, what
could be seen as an electoral threat by a mainstream left party, for example, (see Spoon et al 2014;
Abou-Chadi 2016) the radical right may see as an opportunity. When the greens’ vote share
increases, this signals to the radical right party that the environment, as the greens’ owned issue,
is increasingly salient to voters. Thus, it only follows that they respond by increasing their brand
of environmentalism. Our second hypotheses are thus:
H2a: As the greens’ vote share increases, the radical right’s environment salience increases.
H2b: As the greens’ vote share increases, the radical right’s environmental chauvinism salience
increases.
Similar to the above, when the public’s emphasis on the environmental issue increases, the vote
maximizing radical right will take this opportunity to respond to an issue that voters care about
and increase its emphasis on their version of the issue. They will both ride the wave of public
opinion and engage in a broad issue appeal (Ansolabehere and Iyengar 1994; Somer-Topcu 2015).
This follows the expectations in the literature that when voter issue emphasis increases, so will
parties’ issue emphasis (see e.g. Klüver and Spoon 2016; Klüver and Sagarzazu 2016). Our third
hypotheses are thus:
H3a: As the public’s emphasis on the environmental issue increases, the radical right’s
environment salience increases.
8
H3b: As the public’s emphasis on the environmental issue increases, the radical right’s
environmental chauvinism salience increases.
Finally, we would expect that when both the greens’ vote share and public emphasis on the
environment increase, the effect on the radical right’s overall environmental and environmental
chauvinism emphasis would be larger and its emphasis would increase more. Our final
hypotheses are thus:
H4a: As both the greens’ vote share and the public’s emphasis on the environmental issue increase,
the radical right’s environment salience increases.
H4b: As both the greens’ vote share and the public’s emphasis on the environmental issue increase,
the radical right’s environmental chauvinism salience increases.
Data and Methods
We test the extent to which radical right parties respond to green parties and public opinion by
looking at official party tweets from January 2019 to February 2021. All tweets from official party
accounts in this date range were scraped using Twitter’s Academic API via the Twarc Python
library. In total for the period under analysis, we scraped 43,844 tweets from six radical right
parties: Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, Denmark’s Dansk Folkeparti, France’s
Rassemblement National, the Netherlands’ Forum voor Democratie and Partij voor de Vrijheid, and
Sweden’s Sverigedemokraterna. Along with these Twitter/X accounts, we scraped 12,892 tweets
from five green parties, 70,156 tweets from the main mainstream parties in the five countries
covered in the analysis, and 28,824 tweets from five radical left parties, both of which serve as
control variables. A full list of all parties included in our analysis can be found in Table A1 in the
Appendix.
We chose these five countries based on the following criteria: 1) both radical right and green
parties are more electorally successful in these countries relative to other West European
countries, both in terms of vote and seat share (see Appendix Figure A16); 2) the environment
9
and climate change is listed as the most important issue facing the country by a higher percentage
of the population in these five countries compared to other European countries (see Appendix
Figure A17); and 3) political parties in these five countries tend to use Twitter/X to a greater extent
than other West European countries (see Appendix Figure A18; see also Castanho and Proksch
2022).
We pre-processed tweets in R and translated them into English via Google Translate (De Vries et
al. 2018). Our unit of analysis is party-day observations, since this allows us to analyze in a more
instantaneous and dynamic way the response of radical right parties on Twitter/X to the daily
tweets from green parties and public opinion emphasis. We use Twitter/X to analyze radical right
party responsiveness and differentiation on the environment for two reasons. First, while
previous studies on party responsiveness have traditionally used manifesto data (Spoon et al.
2014; Han 2015; Abou-Chadi 2016), this data is only available per election cycle. This does not
allow us to measure the kind of immediate response from parties that Twitter data permits.
Moreover, the expansion of radical right parties’ issue portfolio, including environmental
chauvinism, is a more recent phenomenon which may not be captured by looking at election cycle
data throughout the past four decades. Second, while manifestos have a significant inertia from
one election to the next and speak mostly to party activists (Dinas and Gemenis 2010; Han 2015),
Twitter has become an important platform for parties to speak directly to voters (van Kessel and
Castelein 2016; Tromble 2018; Russell 2020). Moreover, previous studies show that the content
posted by political parties and politicians on their Twitter accounts is highly representative of
their overall ideological positions (Barberá 2015; Castanho and Proksch 2022).
Dependent Variables
Our dependent variables, RR Environment Salience and RR Environmental Chauvinism Salience,
measure the percentage of daily tweets in a radical right party’s official Twitter/X account which
is dedicated to the environment and environmental chauvinism respectively. RR Environment
Salience is obtained by identifying all party tweets mentioning environment keywords, such as
climate, sustainability, global warming, and clean air (see Table A2 in the Appendix). RR
10
Environmental Chauvinism Salience identifies tweets mentioning these environment keywords plus
chauvinism keywords, such as sovereign, nation, border, and local (see Table A3 in the
Appendix). Overall, 5.1% of radical right (RR) tweets in the date range analyzed are environment-
related, compared to 36.7% which are chauvinism-related. Importantly, 34.4% of RR environment
tweets use chauvinistic rhetoric. The tweets from Le Pen and Vinge referenced above are
examples of these. While the overall 5.1% environment salience number may seem small, it
should be noted that this is just one of several topics political parties focus on in their daily
messaging. In comparison, environmental salience is 7.0% for mainstream parties, 9.9% for
radical left parties, and a much higher 29.8% for green parties, as we would expect.
After identifying tweets using environment topics and environmental chauvinism, we obtain a
mean salience score per day for both variables, which is the percentage of party tweets in any
given day that talk about the environment or environmental chauvinism, respectively. In
equation form:
These measures of salience mimic the ones used in the literature with manifesto data (Spoon et
al. 2014; Abou-Chadi 2016). The mean daily environmental chauvinism salience in RR tweets is
1.8%. For comparison, the mean daily RR chauvinism salience is 31.6% and the mean daily RR
environment salience is 5.5% (versus 25.1% for green parties, 6.4% for mainstream parties, and
8.9% for radical left parties).
Independent Variables
11
Our first main independent variable is GRN Environment Salience (t-1), which is a green party’s
percentage of daily tweets dedicated to environmental issues. This is obtained using the same
calculation as in the equation above and the same environment keywords in Table A2. This
measure is lagged one day. The mean daily salience score is 25.1%.
Our second main independent variable is GRN Weekly Polling (t-1), which is a proxy for vote share
and the level of electoral threat that green parties represent. We calculated a weekly polling
average for each green party from EuropeElects.eu polling data. This measure is lagged one week.
The mean weekly polling average is 10.5%.
Our third main independent variable is Public Climate Emphasis (t-1), which measures the degree
to which the public is interested in environmental issues. We use weekly Google Trends Data per
country measuring public Google searches for the topic “climate” as a proxy for public opinion
interest in environmental issues. We chose the climate topic as climate change is the most salient
environmental issue today in European countries according to polling (Ipsos 2020) and
Eurobarometer (see Figure A10 in the Appendix). Google Trends data measures the relative
popularity of topics in Google scaled on a range from 0 to 100 based on a topic’s proportion to all
searches on all topics (Google 2024). Previous studies have used Google Trends as a proxy for
public opinion interest in or emphasis on a certain issue (Mellon 2014; Askitas 2015; Chen et al.
2015; Wolf 2018; Dancy and Fariss 2024).
Google Trends allows searches for topics and terms. While a topic provides search data on a
group of related terms regardless of language, a term only provides search data on that specific
term and in a specific language. For instance, the topic “climate” (denoted with freebase code
“/m/01s_5”) provides search data on the “climate” term but also on related terms such as “climate
change,” “global warming,” and “renewable energy,” and their equivalents in all languages (e.g.
“klima” in German, “changement climatique” in French, “calentamiento global” in Spanish, etc.).
On the other hand, the “climate” term only provides data on how much people searched that
word on Google and in that specific language. Therefore, due to its more comprehensive nature
12
and applicability across languages, we use topic searches in our analysis. Finally, since Google
Trends data only provides a relative measure of search popularity rather than absolute searches,
in order to make the data comparable across countries we downloaded the data from the five
countries we are focusing on at the same time in a single search using the gtrendsR R package.
The mean weekly public environmental emphasis using the “climate” topic in the five countries
analyzed is 29.67 in a 0-100 scale (see Figure A11 in the Appendix for the search trendlines by
country).
5
Finally, in order to test H4, we interact our green polling variable with public
environmental emphasis.
We also include a series of controls that may affect the extent to which radical right parties make
environmental chauvinism salient. We control for mainstream parties’ environment salience at t-
1 (MSP Environment Salience t-1) and radical left parties’ environment salience at t-1 (RL
Environment Salience t-1) since RR parties may also respond to the environmental messages of
mainstream and far-left competitors. The measure for mainstream parties combines the daily
average salience of the environment among a country’s main center-right and center-left parties.
For example, in the case of Denmark, this measure combines the daily salience of the environment
in tweets from both the Liberal Party and the Social Democrats. The same calculation is used as
in the equation above. We also control for the average level of engagement a party’s
environmental tweets generate in any given day. This results from adding environment-related
tweets’ likes, re-tweets, quotes, and replies and obtaining a daily average measure per party. This
follows Ballard et al. (2022).
6
We obtain this lagged measure for green parties (GRN Enviro.
Engagement t-1), mainstream parties (MSP Enviro. Engagement t-1), and radical left parties (RL
Enviro. Engagement t-1). See all descriptive statistics on Table A4 in the Appendix.
Since party messages on Twitter are likely to follow a certain inertia (as in the case of party
manifestos), we include the lagged dependent variable in all models to control for potential
5
Google Trends only provides daily data for periods shorter than three months.
6
Unlike Ballard et al. (2022), we include in our engagement measure quotes and replies, as their inclusion
provides a more accurate measure of overall engagement with a tweet. However, when we exclude these
two categories and only use likes and retweets as in Ballard et al., our findings remain unchanged.
13
autocorrelation due to the time-series nature of the data. We run OLS regressions with robust
standard errors clustered by party-years and include party and year fixed effects in some models.
Results
We first look at the predictors of RR Environment Salience or the average daily salience of
environment-related rhetoric in a radical right party’s tweets. Table 1 shows a series of OLS
regressions for this measure. As we would expect, the lagged dependent variable predicts
salience at time t. In terms of the main independent variables, all three (green environment
salience (H1a), green weekly polling (H2a), and public climate emphasis at time t-1 (H3a) are
positively correlated with the extent to which RR parties speak about the environment at time t
Table 1. Explaining Radical Right Environment Salience
DV: RR Environment Salience
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
Lagged DV
0.128***
0.047
0.120***
0.045
(0.044)
(0.034)
(0.041)
(0.034)
GRN Enviro Salience t-1
0.024*
0.029*
0.021*
0.028*
(0.013)
(0.015)
(0.012)
(0.015)
GRN Weekly Polling t-1
0.391*
0.519**
0.019
0.060
(0.226)
(0.240)
(0.096)
(0.300)
Public Climate Emphasis t-1
0.155**
0.094***
-0.083
-0.043
(0.068)
(0.035)
(0.089)
(0.065)
GRN Polling x Public Emphasis
0.020*
0.013***
(0.011)
(0.004)
GRN Enviro Engage t-1
0.001
0.001
0.001
0.001
(0.001)
(0.001)
(0.001)
(0.001)
MSP Enviro Salience t-1
0.033
0.035
0.032
0.036
(0.040)
(0.033)
(0.039)
(0.033)
MSP Enviro Engage t-1
-0.001*
-0.001**
-0.001**
-0.001**
(0.000)
(0.000)
(0.000)
(0.000)
RL Enviro Salience t-1
0.009
0.024
0.006
0.021
(0.014)
(0.019)
(0.014)
(0.019)
RL Enviro Engage t-1
-0.002
-0.001
-0.001
0.000
(0.002)
(0.002)
(0.002)
(0.003)
14
DV: RR Environment Salience
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
Party FE
✔
✔
Year FE
✔
✔
Constant
-3.125
-7.377*
1.445
0.807
(2.972)
(4.293)
(1.770)
(5.555)
Observations
2173
2173
2173
2173
R2
0.078
0.150
0.086
0.152
R2 Adj.
0.074
0.144
0.082
0.145
Std.Errors
Party-Year
Party-Year
Party-Year
Party-Year
(although in the case of green salience, only at the 10% level). Moreover, as demonstrated in
Models 3 and 4, there is an interactive effect between Green polling and public emphasis (H4a).
That is, the higher green parties’ polling and the public’s emphasis on the environment, the more
RR parties tweet about the environment. Figure 1 shows this interactive effect for the salience of
RR environment tweets. As we can see, RR parties respond to green parties’ electoral threat by
talking more about the environmental issue, but only when the public emphasis on the
environment is high. When public interest is low, the greens’ electoral threat has no effect. In
substantive terms, when public interest on the environment based on Google searches of the
climate topic is at its highest, the percentage of RR tweets talking about the environment goes
from 0 when green parties are polling below 5% to around 25 when greens are polling at 20%, a
substantively significant increase in the space dedicated to environmental topics by RR parties.
Table 2 now looks at the results explaining our second dependent variable, RR Environmental
Chauvinism Salience, or the extent to which radical right parties talk about the environment in a
chauvinistic way. As we would expect, the use of environmental chauvinism in the previous day
predicts environmental chauvinism at time t. As we can see, green parties’ environmental salience
per se does not seem to affect RR parties’ use of environmental chauvinism, contrary to our
expectation in H1b. Similarly, green parties’ electoral success as proxied by weekly polling does
not seem to affect RR parties’ use of environmental chauvinism, contrary to H2b.
15
Figure 1. Effect of Green Weekly Polling on RR Environment Salience
at Different Levels of Public Environment Emphasis
Note: The figure is based on Model 4. The histogram along the x-axis is the
distribution of the Green weekly polling variable.
What does influence the use of environmental chauvinistic rhetoric by the radical right is the
public’s interest in the environment. The more the public engages in searches about the
environment (or, in this case, climate-related topics) on Google the previous week, the higher the
percentage of radical right parties’ tweets dedicated to the environment in chauvinistic terms.
This is in line with our expectation in H3b and suggests that the radical right’s brand of
environmentalism, i.e. environmental chauvinism, is mostly a rhetorical device used to appeal to an
electorate increasingly concerned about the environment in general and climate change in
particular, linking the issue to the radical right’s traditional focus on chauvinism and nationalism.
To examine the substantive effects of public emphasis on the environment on RR environmental
chauvinism, figure 2 plots the predicted increase in the salience of environmental chauvinism at
different levels of public emphasis. The shaded areas represent the 95% confidence intervals and
the histogram along the x-axis is the distribution of the public climate emphasis variable. The
16
figure demonstrates that going from no public interest in the environment to the maximum
amount of interest as measured by Google searches on the climate topic increases the salience of
environmental chauvinism from 1% of daily RR tweets to more than 4%, an increase of 3
percentage points or 4 times the salience under a scenario of no public interest. While these
numbers may seem small, this is a substantively significant increase in salience, particularly when
taking into consideration the multiplicity of issues that parties can talk about on Twitter/X (along
with non-issue tweets related to a candidate participation on a TV show or a campaign rally, etc.).
Table 2. Explaining Radical Right Environmental Chauvinism Salience
DV: RR Enviro Chauvinism Salience
(5)
(6)
(7)
(8)
Lagged DV
0.108***
0.081**
0.107***
0.081**
(0.033)
(0.033)
(0.033)
(0.033)
GRN Enviro Salience t-1
0.006
0.007
0.005
0.007
(0.008)
(0.008)
(0.008)
(0.008)
GRN Weekly Polling t-1
0.081
-0.086
0.022
-0.139
(0.055)
(0.113)
(0.051)
(0.127)
Public Climate Emphasis t-1
0.047***
0.035*
0.009
0.019
(0.014)
(0.018)
(0.030)
(0.036)
GRN Polling x Public Emphasis
0.003
0.002
(0.002)
(0.003)
GRN Enviro Engage t-1
-0.001
-0.001
-0.001
-0.001
(0.000)
(0.000)
(0.000)
(0.000)
MSP Enviro Salience t-1
0.008
0.012
0.008
0.012
(0.014)
(0.014)
(0.014)
(0.014)
MSP Enviro Engage t-1
0.000
0.000*
0.000
0.000*
(0.000)
(0.000)
(0.000)
(0.000)
RL Enviro Salience t-1
-0.001
0.005
-0.002
0.005
(0.011)
(0.010)
(0.011)
(0.010)
RL Enviro Engage t-1
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
(0.001)
(0.001)
(0.001)
(0.001)
Party FE
✔
✔
Year FE
✔
✔
Constant
-0.335
2.519
0.392
3.459
(0.806)
(2.278)
(0.848)
(2.537)
17
DV: RR Enviro Chauvinism Salience
(5)
(6)
(7)
(8)
Observations
2173
2173
2173
2173
R2
0.029
0.058
0.029
0.058
R2 Adj.
0.025
0.051
0.025
0.051
Std.Errors
Party-Year
Party-Year
Party-Year
Party-Year
Figure 2. Effect of Public Environment Emphasis on RR Environmental Chauvinism
Note: The figure is based on Model 6. The histogram along the x-axis is the distribution of the public
climate emphasis variable.
Finally, looking at the interaction between green weekly polling and public environmental
emphasis suggests that there is no effect on RR environmental chauvinism (H4b). Figure 3 then
provides a closer look by examining the effect of green parties’ weekly polling average at different
levels of public environmental emphasis. As above, the shaded areas represent the 95%
confidence intervals. The rug plot along the x-axis is the distribution of the greens’ weekly polling
average. As we can see, when green parties poll less than 7%, the effect of public environmental
emphasis on RR environmental chauvinism is not statistically different whether the public is
more or less interested on the environment. However, when green parties poll above 7%, RR
environmental chauvinism salience is higher when public interest on the environment is at its
highest, increasing the salience of environmental chauvinism to almost 10% of RR tweets when
18
greens are polling above 20%. Moreover, when public interest is low, even when the greens are
polling well, RR environmental chauvinism salience remains close to 0%. Importantly, these
results are only significant in Model 7. The effect goes away once we include party and year fixed
effects. This provides some evidence for the notion that environmental chauvinism is higher
when both the public is interested in the environment and green parties are high in the polls, as
H4b expected. These results demonstrate that radical right parties are taking advantage of two
opportunities—both the increase in public salience and the growing popularity of the greens—
and talking more about the environment with a chauvinist focus.
Figure 3. Effect of Green Weekly Polling on RR Environmental Chauvinism Salience
At Different Levels of Public Environment Emphasis
Note. The figure is based on Model 7. The histogram along the x-axis is the
distribution of the Green weekly polling variable.
Robustness Checks
We ran a series of robustness checks to test whether the results for both overall environment
salience and environmental chauvinism are driven by the specific Google Trends “climate” topic
we chose, which could potentially include searches not related to environmental concerns such
as inquiries about the climate and the weather in a specific city or region. We created an index of
19
environment-related topics including “climate,” “climate change,” “environment,”
“renewables,” “global warming,” “sustainability,” “pollution,” “wildfire,” “flood,” and “nuclear
power.” Tables A7 and A8 in the Appendix show the results for the two dependent variables. The
results remain mostly consistent with the models presented in the main analysis using the
“climate” topic. We also examined whether RR parties respond to the increasing salience of the
environment in rival parties’ tweets—greens, mainstream parties, and radical left parties—when
public emphasis is high via an interaction term, but the results are either statistically or
substantively insignificant (see Tables A9-A11 in the Appendix). It seems that the main driver of
RR environmental salience (overall and in its chauvinistic variety) is the interaction of green party
electoral success and public emphasis, but not whether green parties talk more about the
environment relative to other issues. Moreover, whether mainstream parties or radical left parties
talk about the environment does not seem to affect RR environmental salience, regardless of
public emphasis.
7
In order to validate our dictionary approach to classify tweets based on keywords, we conducted
two validation metrics. First, we validated our dictionary-based classification of environment-
related tweets using MTurk workers. We randomly selected a sample of 2,000 tweets after
applying a quota with one third of the tweets being environment-related (based on our original
dictionary classification) and two thirds non-environment related. This quota is due to the fact
that environment-related tweets represent 5.1% of all radical right tweets (see Appendix Table
A5). We then used Amazon’s MTurk to manually code these 2,000 tweets as either environment-
related or non-environment related. We used three MTurk coders per tweet and considered to be
agreement between our dictionary-based classification and the Mturk manual coding if at least
two of the three coders agreed with the dictionary classification. This results in a classification
agreement rate between the dictionary approach and the manual coding approach of 94% (see
Figure A13 in the Appendix). This provides reassurance on our dictionary classification for
environment tweets.
7
Separate regression models at the country level are included in Appendix Tables A12-A21. Overall,
country-level results replicate most of our main results.
20
Second, we validated our dictionary-based classification of environment tweets as either
chauvinist or non-chauvinist by implementing a Wordfish text analysis model. Wordfish uses an
unsupervised scaling approach to classify and measure positions in text on a unidimensional
scale (Slapin and Proksch 2008). Since we are trying to identify tweets that use nationalist or
chauvinist language versus those which do not, we could think of this as a unidimensional scale
from non-chauvinist tweets to chauvinist tweets. We run a series a Wordfish classification models
by country. The model uses a combination of tweets that represent the two ends of the
unidimensional scale (see selected tweets in Appendix Table A22).
We then regressed our dictionary classification on the Wordfish values to obtain the probability
of Wordfish values predicting keyword-based dictionary categorization. These results per
country can be seen in Appendix Figures A14-A15. For most countries, there is a strong
correlation between the Wordfish and dictionary approaches, the main exception being Denmark.
This is not surprising given that this country has a considerably smaller sample size in terms of
the number of tweets posted by the radical right party Dansk Folkeparti. Overall, the results from
the Wordfish models provide some reassurance on our dictionary approach.
Discussion
In this article, we have sought to examine what explains increasing radical right environment and
environmental chauvinism salience. Building on previous research which has demonstrated that
non-mainstream parties will expand their issue emphasis to include issues owned by other non-
mainstream parties when public salience is high, we have argued that radical right parties engage
in a two-pronged strategy of responsiveness (see Ansolabehere and Iyengar 1994; Klüver and
Spoon 2016) and differentiation (Downs 1957; Cox 1990; Kitschelt 1994). First, radical right parties
increase their emphasis on the environment in response to both threats and opportunities--
increasing green party environmental salience, when green parties are polling better, and when
the public’s emphasis on the issue increases. Second, they differentiate themselves from other
parties which may also be increasing their emphasis on the environmental issue by increasing
their emphasis on a particular brand of environmentalism—environmental chauvinism—when the
21
public’s emphasis on the environmental issue increases and when the green’s electoral fortunes
increase, a combination of a threat and an opportunity.
These findings have important implications for the evolution of environmental discourse in
European party systems. No longer strictly a green or even left-wing issue, the environment is
now a salient issue for parties regardless of where they are on the ideological spectrum.
Importantly, however, the environment as an issue can be used instrumentally by radical right
parties to pursue a nationalist or chauvinist agenda. This could not be clearer than in the comment
by Jordan Bardella, a Rassemblement National Member of the European Parliament who said that
“Borders are the environment’s greatest ally; it is through them that we will save the planet”
(Mazque 2019). Thus, we have seen the issue evolution of the environment issue (Carmines and
Stimson 1986) as well as issue entrepreneurship (Hobolt and de Vries 2015; de Vries and Hobolt
2020) on the part of the radical right to introduce its chauvinist brand of environmentalism.
Indeed, we could argue that the radical right has become the issue owner of environmental
chauvinism (Budge and Farlie 1983; Walgrave et al 2015).
Importantly, though, as our findings demonstrate, we are witnessing the development of two
types of environmentalism in European party systems. One could argue that the radical right’s
rhetoric on the environment which does not focus on their unique branding may be seen as ‘cheap
talk’ by voters and will not mobilize them to vote for the party. However, for those voters who
care about the environment, but see its protection as important as the defense of national borders
or are skeptical of international treaties to address environmental degradation, they may
increasingly turn to the radical right. Notably, mainstream parties could also seek to
accommodate these environmentally chauvinist focused voters by shifting their emphasis and
position and changing their rhetoric to appeal to these voters.
There is, of course, more work to be done on this question. First, future research should include
more parties and years in the data analyzed. The difference in radical right response and
differentiation during and outside of electoral periods should also be considered. Second, it will
22
be important to look at the electoral implications of radical right parties’ increasing emphasis on
environmental chauvinism. While we have demonstrated the radical right listens, do voters in
turn hear what the radical right is saying and respond? Does environmental chauvinism on the
part of the RR party increase these attitudes among voters? Does it matter which party the voter
supported previously or how important the issue is? Moreover, is the radical right trying to
attract new voters using this strategy or simply keep its existing voters? A survey experiment, for
example, would be useful for understanding the effects of this rhetoric on voters and if they stick
with their current party (including the RR) or switch to another party. Finally, future studies
should go beyond salience and look at issue positioning on the environment. In other words,
radical right parties can talk about environmental issues in a chauvinistic way to either advance
or oppose a green agenda, or to offer a mixed view on green issues. Consider the three tweets
below:
“Sweden is at the forefront of the world in terms of carbon dioxide-free steelmaking technology. If
Sweden loses market share to other countries, the environmental impact will increase globally. We
must therefore preserve our domestic industry.” –Sverigedemokraterna, December 19, 2019
“Paris climate goals cannot be achieved without an eco-dictatorship!” –Alternative für
Deutschland, January 13, 2021
“Wind and solar energy are expensive and unreliable. Moreover, they destroy the Dutch landscape.
That is why #FVD is focusing on nuclear energy. That's affordable and reliable!” –Forum voor
Democratie, February 2, 2020
8
While the first tweet from Sweden’s Sverigedemokraterna uses nationalistic rhetoric in a pro-
environment way, the second tweet from the German AfD frames the Paris climate accord and
the broader issue of climate change in an anti-environmental way. Finally, the third tweet from
8
See more examples on Table A6 in the Appendix.
23
the Dutch Forum voor Democratie uses environmental chauvinism (“destroy the Dutch landscape”)
in a mixed-environmental way. While it opposes renewable energy sources like wind and solar,
it recognizes the need for other carbon-neutral sources of energy in the form of nuclear power.
Thus, future studies should continue to explore under which conditions radical right parties use
environmental chauvinism to either advance or oppose a green agenda.
24
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