Project Description

The New Climate Divide (ClimateDivide) project, financed by the DFG Emmy Noether Programme, examines how climate change is shifting from a largely valence issue into a positional, cleavage-forming conflict with the potential to restructure political competition and collective identities in Europe. The project argues that polarisation is fuelled both by the consolidation of a regressive, often radical-right front contesting climate reforms and by the mainstreaming, and fragmentation of a progressive “green field.” It conceptualises climate politics as a distributive conflict in a geopolitically charged polycrisis context, where relative winners and losers are mobilised through competing frames over (1) problem definition (acknowledgement vs. scepticism), (2) the scope of intervention (market-based fixes vs. broader climate-justice transformation), and (3) the pace of reform (gradual adaptation vs. fast intervention).

Empirically, ClimateDivide maps and explains this emerging cleavage across both electoral and civil-society arenas in seven European countries (France, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Hungary, Romania) over 2010–2030. It combines computational social science and “text-as-data” approaches, drawing on media data, with surveys and survey experiments, implemented in the context of an original panel data, and qualitative focus groups with both organisations and participants on the progressive and the regressive sides of the divide. This mixed-methods design enables systematic comparisons of coalitions’ repertoires of contention, individual-level participation (depth, breadth, and action form), and the dynamics of in- and out-group identity formation.