Retrogradism in context. Varieties of right-wing populist climate politics

Abstract

In this paper, we argue against an all-too-easy ‘climate bad guy’ thesis, which holds that in right-wing populism climate change denialism or at least skepticism is one-dimensional, i.e. right-wing populist parties generally reject climate change mitigation. To this end, we present a revision of the ‘populism as thin-centered ideology’ approach and situate populist politics in the context of a process we refer to as devolution of democracy. We develop a heuristic list of distinct populist climate policy claims for empirical investigation and then apply a contextualist approach by examining differing right-wing populist party positions on climate change mitigation within a two-level framework that covers their positioning towards both the global climate agenda and domestic low-carbon policies. We substantiate our thesis that populist climate politics is retrograde as well as context-relative by drawing on empirical cases from Germany, Austria, and Poland.