The rise and fall of GMOs in politics: party positions and mainstream party behaviour in Western Europe

ABSTRACT

Social and environmental scientists usually argue that political parties hold hostile positions towards GMOs, yet we are confronted with a lack of systematic comparative analyses in the West European context. Conducting a quantitative content analysis of 265 election manifestos in seven Western European countries from 1990 until 2020, we test this assumption and explore the salience of GMOs in election manifestos and the positions of political parties on this domain. Our findings reveal that GMOs are neither a particular salient nor ignored issue by political parties and that most party families do tend to reject GMOs. Mainstream parties are more likely to talk about GMOs and to take a critical stance during periods of high mobilization of anti-GMO movements. Additionally, we hypothesize that the presence of a Green party in the national party system may make a difference. The findings provide insights into mainstream parties’ behaviour on niche issues and information for the scientific community about how political parties may become less hostile towards GMOs.

KEYWORDS:

• Political parties
• party behaviour
• GMO
• content analysis
• regression analysis
• election manifestos
• environmental politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2022.2115654

Notes

1. We refer to the definition of Meguid (2005) defining mainstream parties ‘as the electorally dominant actors in the centre-left, centre, and centre-right blocs on the Left-Right political spectrum.’

2. The link between environmentalist attitudes and opposition towards GMOs is explained in more detail in the research design section.

3. This for instance allows to exclude regionalist parties in Spain and several smaller parties in Italy, which form electoral coalitions with larger parties.

4. If not available we consulted the POLIDOC project (Benoit, Bräuninger, and Debus 2009).

5. Yet, one sentence cannot be counted multiple times.

6. Sample consists of 50% coded and 50% non-coded passages.

7. The original question evaluated by the experts is as follows: ‘To what extent does this party invoke God, religion, or sacred/religious texts to justify its positions?’ (0 = (almost) always; 4 = never).

8. The formula is: (v2paimmig_mean+v2palgbt_mean+v2paculsup_mean+v2pawomlab_mean)/4. For Swiss parties the formula is: (v2paimmig_mean+v2paculsup_mean+v2pawomlab_mean)/3.

9. We used aggregated data from the ZACAT Online Portal (GESIS). The values derive from the EB wave closest to the respective election. In all cases we used data from the wave before the election took place.

10. Furthermore, EB asks about the salience of environmental protection in 1994.

11. The actual question asks: Now I will briefly describe some people. Please listen to each description and tell me how much each person is or is not like you. Use this card for your answer. She/he strongly believes that people should care for nature. Looking after the environment is important to her/him.

12. The working paper and data is available on request. The coding of the climate measurement is slightly different. Instead of full sentences, quasi sentences are used. However, the number of quasi sentences and full sentences per manifesto are quite similar meaning that the scores are adequate for a rough comparison.

13. The mean scores for single parties are illustrated in the appendix and show a rather heterogeneous picture within several party families. Surprisingly, the party most hostile towards GMOs is not a green but a conservative party, the Christian Democratic Centre (CCD) from Italy (net evaluation −2.04 on average), followed by the Swiss Greens (−1.76) and the Austrian populist radical right party Alliance for the Future (BZÖ; −1.33). The most supportive parties are the German liberals (FDP; 0.21), followed by the French centre-right (Republicans/UMP/UDF; 0.18) and German Christian democrats (CDU/CSU; 0.17).

14. We changed the ParlGov classification of the Italian party AN considering it a far-right instead of conservative actor.

15. Changing the country used as reference category does not alter the results.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jakob Schwörer

Jakob Schwörer is postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Political Science at the Leuphana University Lüneburg. In 2019 he was a visiting scholar at the Center for Research on Extremism (C-Rex) at Oslo University and guest researcher at the Department of Government at Uppsala University in 2021. His research focuses on parties, populist, nativist and religious communication of political actors in a comparative perspective.

Xavier Romero Vidal

Xavier Romero-Vidal is a Research Associate at the Centre for the Future of Democracy at Cambridge University, studying the drivers of democratic legitimacy across countries and over time. His main research interest is the study of the evolution of public opinion and political behavior from a comparative perspective.

Silvana Moreno Vallejo

Silvana Patricia Moreno Vallejo is PhD student at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Uppsala. She works at the Department of Plant Biology and investigates plants’ adaptation to climate change and breading for high-quality traits.