Weathering growing polarization? The European Parliament and EU foreign climate policy ambitions

ABSTRACT

The European Union (EU) faces two parallel trends of growing polarization. Externally, ambitious climate action has become more contested and global power relations are shifting. Internally, European elections brought more Eurosceptics to Parliament, altering its political majorities and making it more difficult for mainstream parties to continue the European Parliament’s (EP) long-standing policy positions such as ambitious climate policy. We analyze the impact of growing internal and external polarization trends on Members of European Parliament (MEPs) and political group’s positions on EU foreign climate policy ambitions between 2009 and 2019. Using an original dataset of plenary debates, we find that the EP as a whole has remained surprisingly stable in its support of ambitious foreign climate policy. Yet, when looking at the qualitative details of MEPs’ positions, we uncover significant variance in the ways in which MEPs from various political groups perceive the EU’s global role over time.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate leadership
• EP political groups
• European Parliament
• foreign climate policy
• global shifts
• polarization

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all 15 student assistants who helped us translate the plenary speeches and Elke Cloetens for helping us with the inter-coder reliability of our analysis. We also are very grateful for the valuable comments and support by the special issue editors. Moreover, we want to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback. We tremendously benefitted from discussions at the 2019 GOVTRAN workshop in Rome, the 2019 ECPR General Conference and the 2020 ECPR Joint Sessions.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the KU Leuven Faculty of Social Sciences, the C1 Project CONNECTIVITY funded by the KU Leuven Onderzoeksraad, the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (FWO) under Grant 11H3120N, and the Jean Monnet Network GOVTRAN – Governing the EU’s Climate and Energy Transition in Turbulent Times, with the support of the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union.

Notes on contributors

Franziska Petri

Franziska Petri is a FWO doctoral fellow at the Leuven International and European Studies (LINES) at the University of Leuven.

Katja Biedenkopf

Katja Biedenkopf is Associate Professor of Sustainability Politics at the Leuven International and European Studies (LINES) at the University of Leuven.