Policlim: A Dataset of Climate Change Discourse in EU Political Manifestos from 1990-2022

With ambitious action required to achieve global climate mitigation goals, climate change has become increasingly salient in the political arena. This letter presents a dataset of climate change salience in 1,294 political manifestos of 445 political parties across different party families in 27 European countries from 1990 to 2022. Importantly, our measure uniquely isolates climate change salience, avoiding the conflation with general environmental and sustainability content found in other datasets. Exploiting recent advances in supervised machine learning, we developed the dataset by fine-tuning a pre-trained multilingual transformer with human coding, employing a resource-efficient and replicable pipeline for multilingual text classification that can serve as a template for similar tasks. The dataset unlocks new avenues of research on political discourse on climate change, on the role of parties in climate policy making, and on the political economy of climate change. We make the model and the dataset available to the research community.