The New Climate Divide

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Endre Borbáth
• Subject Area: Political Science ; Empirical Social Research
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 552106810

The proposed project, ClimateDivide, seeks to understand the structure and implications of a new climate divide emerging in electoral and civil society mobilization. The project's guiding thesis is that the politics of climate change is entering a new critical phase of contestation across Europe, with the emergence of a right-wing front and the mainstreaming and fragmentation of the 'green field'. Polarization and the emerging conflict constellation have transformed climate change from a valence to a positional issue, threatening the adaptation and implementation of the necessary reforms aimed at climate neutrality. However, it remains unclear how the issue of climate change is embedded in existing conflict dimensions. On the one hand, green and right-wing actors associated with so-called cultural or second-dimension conflicts are the main politicizing actors. On the other hand, climate change is also transforming socio-economic conflicts as mainstream parties take up positions on the issue. This transformation is exacerbated by the polycrisis context that has led to the politicization of climate change as a (re)distributive conflict. ClimateDivide argues that how actors mobilize within the emerging conflict constellation determines who participates in what form in the electoral and civil society arenas. The project will bring together supply-side and demand-side dynamics. It maps the repertoire of contention of the main mobilizing actors, identifies their effect on individual-level participation, and zooms in on the dynamic of group formation under the pressure of the geopolitically charged, polycrisis context. The project innovates by bridging scholarly traditions in political mobilization, political participation, and the political consequences of crises, linking the different levels with causal analysis and descriptive evidence. Specifically, ClimateDivide will use a mixed-methods approach and invest heavily in original data collection. The project combines state-of-the-art computational social science and survey-experimental methods with qualitative focus groups of mobilizing organization and participants in climate protests. Data will be collected between 2010 and 2030 in seven European countries selected from Northwestern (France, Germany, Sweden), Southern (Italy, Spain), and Central and Eastern Europe (Hungary, Romania).

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups