Jun.-Prof. Dr. Endre Borbáth The New Climate Divide

The new ClimateDivide project, funded by the DFG’s Emmy Noether Program, examines how climate change is evolving from a largely value-based issue into a positional conflict that creates lines of division and has the potential to reshape political competition and collective identities in Europe. The project argues that polarization is driven both by the consolidation of a regressive, often far-right front that opposes climate reforms and by the mainstreaming and fragmentation of a progressive “green field.” It conceptualizes climate policy as a distributive conflict within a geopolitically charged context of multiple crises, in which relative winners and losers are mobilized through competing interpretive frameworks regarding (1) the definition of the problem (acknowledgment vs. skepticism), (2) the scope of political intervention (market-based solutions vs. a broader transformation in the spirit of climate justice), and (3) the pace of reform (gradual adaptation vs. rapid intervention).

ClimateDivide empirically maps and explains this emerging line of conflict both in the arena of electoral competition and in civil society across seven European countries (France, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Hungary, and Romania) during the period 2010–2030. The project combines computer-assisted social science and “text-as-data” approaches based on media data with surveys and survey experiments conducted as part of a dedicated panel design, as well as qualitative focus groups with organizations and participants on both the progressive and regressive sides of the conflict line. This mixed-methods design enables systematic comparisons of the repertoires of collective action by coalitions of actors, individual participation (depth, breadth, and form of action), and the dynamics of in-group and out-group identity formation.