Is populism a challenge to European energy and climate policy? Empirical evidence across varieties of populism

ABSTRACT

Despite the burgeoning literature, evidence on how right-wing populists frame and act on energy and climate issues is limited and even more scarce for other types of populist parties. We address this gap by exploring the policy discourses, positions and actions of six European populist parties from Austria, Czechia, Greece, Italy, Poland and Spain belonging to different types of populism. We argue that there is substantial and largely neglected variation among different populist parties in their approach to and effects on EU energy and climate policy (ECP). We find support for the notion that right-wing and right-leaning valence populist parties are at odds with ambitious EU ECP. On the contrary, the analysed left-wing and left-leaning valence populists rely on populist discourses to demand more ambitious ECP measures. Furthermore, our analysis suggests that participation in government decreases the role of populism in parties’ ECP discourse and dilutes parties’ positions and actions.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate policy
• energy transitions
• European Union
• populism

Acknowledgements

All authors contributed equally to the manuscript. Earlier versions were presented at the Rome Special Issue workshop organized under the auspices of the Jean-Monnet network ‘Governing the EU’s Climate and Energy Transition in Turbulent Times’ (GOVTRAN) (supported by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union) and at the 2020 ECPR Joint Session. We thank participants of these events, the anonymous reviewers, and the Special Issue editors for their comments. We acknowledge financial support by the Open Access Publication Fund of the University of Salzburg.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

Kacper Szulecki and Tomas Maltby disclose that the article emerged from the ‘Anatomy of Disbelief’ project funded by the Noble Foundation's Programme on Modern Poland (http://pomp.com.pl/en/) which ran from 10/2018 to 06/2020.

Notes on contributors

Robert A. Huber

Robert A. Huber is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Political Science and Sociology, University of Salzburg, Austria.

Tomas Maltby

Tomas Maltby is a Senior Lecturer in International Politics in the Department of Political Economy, King’s College London.

Kacper Szulecki

Kacper Szulecki is a Research Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, Norway.

Stefan Ćetković

Stefan Ćetković is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Bavarian School of Public Policy, Technical University of Munich, Germany.