Humanity knows about its limited time to act if it hopes to prevent further climate change and limit global warming to 1.5 or even 2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels. Not to mention that 2 degrees will already have catastrophic events in most areas of the world. Scientists have underlying the necessity to limit emissions for decades. The technological expertise to undergo transitions from carbon-based toward emission-neutral economies are available. Which leaves us with a leaking pipeline. If humanity knows that it has to act to prevent catastrophic climate change and also knows what to do and how, why is it not acting? Or in other words: Why are politics worldwide so slow to adapt suitable measures to combat climate change? A variety of answers have been given. Public support for these (often costly) measures is low. That is, maybe – despite all its knowledge on the consequences of non-action – humanity simply does not want to prevent climate change. Or at least not prevent it if it comes at a (personal) cost. Another answer to the raised question might be that political elites act on a time horizon that only stretches until the next (or the next but one) election. Modern democratic systems might thus be unfit to address the dynamics of climate change. And finally, from a more theoretical political science perspective, protecting the climate is a perfect example of a classic prisoner dilemma and a collective action problem. Humanity might be best served if all nation states would invest in protecting the climate, but for individual states, it makes little sense to invest resources if all the other countries would adopt measures. Hence, no one is acting. While all of these answers seem partly correct, they are also broad. There is still much to understand about the underlying mechanics of the leaking pipeline. In my dissertation, I try to zoom in on political elites in Europe. Political elites are critical actors that eventually have to discuss, promote, and adapt climate-protecting policies. While they can be influenced by external actors such as public protest or referendums, it is ultimately their action that enables political change.

I  examine the nexus of political elites and climate action. By doing so, I  identify answers to the question of what drives political actors to engage and position themselves on issues of climate change and climate protection policies. To provide insights into these determinants, I rely on different types of data, such as textual data like manifestos and parliamentary speeches, or survey data. I also include a variety of political actors, such as parties, members of parliament, and candidates. The five content-related chapters all focus on slightly different dynamics of the above-mentioned nexus. In Chapter 2, I focus on parties in European democracies and examine one of many determinants of when actors talk about climate change, in this case, the impact of climate disasters. In Chapter 3, I narrow the scope to the German nation-state level and show (together with Marc Debus) that age is a crucial determinant of who engages with climate change. As a result of issues with measurement in chapter 3, in chapter 4 Lukas Isermann, David Schweizer, and I develop a new machine learning approach to better classify climate change-related political speeches. Marc Debus, David Schweizer and I use this newly developed tool in Chapter 5 and apply it to parliamentary debates in the German Bundestag, before scaling these speeches and thereby extending the findings from Chapter 3. Finally, in Chapter 6 I move beyond textual data and use GLES survey data of political candidates to identify drivers of their positioning on climate protection policies.