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Abstract

This cumulative dissertation aims to disentangle how political parties' preferences along centre-periphery and left-right axes determine the positions they adopt and the degree of policy ambition they promote in relation to climate change across different levels of government. To this end, four articles are presented in three parts. In the first part, the two initial articles explore the relationship between political party preferences in the centre-periphery divide and climate policy using an innovative methodology that allows the latter to be studied as a distinct and separate entity from environmental policy. The first article, analyzing of party manifestos from the Catalan regional elections of December 2017 and February 2021, confirms the expectations of Green Nationalism scholars in the region by showing that a higher proportion of quasi-sentences dedicated to supporting decentralization and independence correlates with a higher prominence of climate-related content. The second article reveals similar behavior at the national level, which aligns with different theoretical expectations derived not only from territorial identity politics, but also from the literature on Climate Federalism. Analysis of party manifestos from the Spanish general elections of June 2016, November 2019 and July 2023 identifies that parties whose manifestos adopt a more pro-periphery stance tend to give greater prominence to climate policy and renewable energy transition. The second part of the thesis, investigates how the relationship between party preferences in the center-periphery divide and climate policy varies between regional and national elections. Based on the study of Spanish national elections (June 2016 and November 2019) and regional elections in the Basque Country (September 2016 and July 2020) and Catalonia (December 2017 and February 2021), this article shows that the link between the variables analyzed is stronger at the regional level than at the national level. These findings highlight the growing importance of climate change as a priority issue at the regional level, where the importance of specific concerns for regionalist voters drive parties to craft electoral strategies that place greater emphasis on this topic. The third section of the dissertation explores how the political leadership of a Radical Left Party, such as Barcelona in Common, influences the expansion of climate policy instruments and the choice of ‘harder’ versus ‘softer’ policy instruments in the city of Barcelona. The study is based on a database compiling all adopted climate policy instruments and amendments made to pre-existing instruments in the framework of climate-related laws and action plans from January 1984 to 23 May 2023. Interviews with key stakeholders were also conducted. This mixed methods approach confirms that radical left parties enact more climate policy instruments in general, while adopting more ‘hard’ instruments compared to parties of other ideologies. Interestingly, the greater overall proactivity of radical left parties manifests itself in a proportional preference for ‘soft’ over ‘hard’ instruments. Overall, the thesis makes several theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions to the literature on climate policy, party politics, territorial politics, multilevel governance, and the study of policy instruments.