The Evolving Politics of the European Green Deal: New Perspectives Using Text-as-Data Approaches

Focus and Background

The European Green Deal (EGD) has become the main template for framing the politics of climate change in the EU, setting a broad and dynamic agenda of priorities and approaches for policy-making. By defining climate action as a cross-cutting ambition rather than a sectoral issue, the EGD prompts policy expansion and puts a new emphasis on integrated policy-making. Emerging linkages often reach beyond established policy sectors of climate action (e.g., energy, agriculture, transportation) to fields previously not considered within its remit (e.g., migration, finance, and security). More recently, rationales of the EGD agenda have shifted towards a geopolitical approach centred on targets of industrial policy and external action. As new policy linkages are created and established ones are brought into new contexts and perspectives, the politics of climate change in the EU is rapidly changing. What are the implications of these dynamics for the politics of climate change in the EU, and what consequences do they have for the EGD as a critical political ambition of the EU? Addressing this central question, the workshop will produce a Special Issue to advance research, particularly, on the following questions: 

• How and why are linkages between core EGD climate targets and related fields created and constructed, and what is the politics behind that?
• What dynamics drive changes in these linkages' scope, salience and weighting?
• How do involved actors support or contest specific linkages, as well as synergies and trade-offs between them?
• What are the responses from various groups of actors to new linkages and why (e.g., political contestation in legislative arenas, party politics and elections, civil society and the wider public)?
• What are the political implications of policy change on the key ambitions of the EGD?

We particularly welcome papers that apply innovative methodological approaches using quantitative content analysis (or text-as-data) approaches. By becoming widely applied across the social sciences, text-as-data approaches can help map, classify and compare the emergence of policy linkages, their scope and salience, and their contestation within the broadening EGD agenda. Collecting new insights about these linkages, alongside evolving scientific connections between climate change and other policy areas, we aim to highlight the dynamics of change driving the scope, salience and forms of contestation within the EGD. 

Scope of the workshop and planned Special Issue

The workshop will bring together three research debates around the evolution of the EGD:

1. Politics of climate change: Contributions to the workshop will relate to the literature on the contestation of climate change as a political issue, particularly with regard to agenda-setting, party political and parliamentary positions and interactions, civil society mobilization and debate in the public.
2. Climate policy integration: The workshop will integrate and compare conceptual and empirical viewpoints on climate policy integration as a key concept for evaluating shifts of climate policy boundaries and linkages, and their applications across inter- or transnational, domestic, and multi-level governance settings.
3. Methodological innovation: Contributions will engage with discussions of quantitative text-as-data methods for studying climate policy linkages and politics surrounding them, including topic modelling, sentiment analysis, word embeddings, document classification and proximity analysis. 

Empirically, the workshop will focus on the politics of the EGD in the EU both in its internal and external dimensions and in response to exogenous shocks, particularly covering dynamics of change concerning its scope, salience of climate targets, climate linkages and their contestation. We particularly invite contributions focusing on agenda-setting by the European Council and the European Commission, legislative negotiation in the European Parliament, party positions associated with the EGD, as well as civil society, stakeholder and media responses to the evolving issue linkages relating to the questions identified above. 

Format of Workshops, dates and deadline

In preparation for the Special Issue, two hybrid workshops (optional in-person or online participation) will be held around March and July 2025 in Hamburg and Stockholm to discuss first short drafts (first workshop) and subsequently full papers (second workshop). 

The deadline for abstract submission is 10 January 2025. 

Applicants whose papers are selected will be notified shortly after the deadline.

Abstract requirements

• Submit a paper abstracts (300-500 words) 
• Submit a short author bio (50 words)
• Subject of the email: “abstract for EGD workshop”

Address for submitting the abstract and workshop-related inquiries: karina.shyrokykh@ekohist.su.se and frank.wendler@uni-hamburg.de