Climate change represents one of the most significant challenges of our time and increasingly shapes how parties compete in Western Europe. Still, research on this topic, especially regarding intra-party politics, is relatively scarce.
Natural disasters such as severe floods or heatwaves are particularly tangible phenomena of climate change. I argue that such drastic events have a differentiated impact on intra-party politics. In the wake of a natural disaster related to climate change, the salience of climate change should increase in politicians' communication across the full spectrum of the party landscape. At the same time, I expect the issue to become more polarized and to contribute to lower party unity, meaning that politicians within their parties will adopt more extreme, contradictory positions as climate change cuts across the traditional left-right spectrum.
I test these expectations by studying members of parliaments’ communication on Twitter in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. Using a novel supervised learning approach for classification, I detect Tweets about climate change and extract politicians’ attitudes towards this issue.
The granularity of Twitter data allows me to exploit the occurrence of natural disasters as quasi-natural experiments for causal effect estimation. My findings further our understanding of party unity on climate change, which is essential for taking swift action in the fight against climate change.