Policlim: A Dataset of Climate Change Discourse in the Political Manifestos of Forty-Five Countries from 1990 to 2022

With ambitious action required to achieve global climate mitigation goals, climate change has become increasingly salient in the political arena. This article presents a dataset of climate change salience in 1,792 political manifestos of 620 political parties across different party families in forty-five OECD, European, and South American 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 work. 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 the political discourse of 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.