Measuring climate mitigation policy content in text-as-data: navigating the conceptual challenges

A burgeoning comparative politics literature investigates the role of key political actors, such as political parties and members of parliament, in the global challenge of tackling climate change. While text-based indicators of political behaviour, such as parliamentary speeches, questions or social media, provide abundant sources of data for comparative research, much remains to be learned from the rigorous large-scale quantitative analysis of political text in relation to climate change. As a typical first step of text-as-data (TADA) workflows, the isolation of climate-related content is crucial. Yet it is also bedevilled by crucial conceptual complexities inherent to the nature of climate change as a global policy problem. In this note, we unpack these complexities in order to urge future TADA research to be mindful of them. We argue that, especially in comparative research settings, TADA analysts must find means to attenuate the tension between ‘overlooking’ and ‘overstretching’ climate-related text content. An illustrative example drawing on more than 400,000 parliamentary questions in the UK and Germany suggests that a thoughtful combination of off-the-shelf methods can be usefully leveraged to address this important challenge in applied political research.