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Exposure to extreme weather events can make people more aware of environmental changes; however, it remains unclear how such events influence politicians’ behaviour. Combining supervised learning algorithms on over 260,000 press releases by European parties with a difference-in-differences design, we find that apart from Green parties, extreme weather events do not increase attention towards environmental issues. This suggests the consequences of climate change might not directly increase political attention.

Coalition parties have to reconcile two competing logics: they need to demonstrate unity to govern together, but also have to emphasize their own profile to succeed in elections. We argue that the electoral cycle explains whether unity or differentiation prevails. While differentiation dominates at the beginning and the end of the legislative term in close proximity to elections, compromise dominates the middle of the term when coalition governments focus on enacting a common policy agenda. To test our theoretical claims, we draw on an innovative quantitative text analysis of more than 21,000 press releases published by coalition parties from 2000 until 2010.

Framing plays an important role in public policy. Interest groups strategically highlight some aspects of a policy proposal while downplaying others in order to steer the policy debate in a favorable direction. Despite the importance of framing, we still know relatively little about the framing strategies of interest groups due to methodological difficulties that have prevented scholars from systematically studying interest group framing across a large number of interest groups and multiple policy debates. This article therefore provides an overview of three novel research methods that allow researchers to systematically measure interest group frames. More specifically, this article introduces a word-based quantitative text analysis technique, a manual, computer-assisted content analysis approach and face-to-face interviews designed to systematically identify interest group frames. The results generated by all three techniques are compared on the basis of a case study of interest group framing in an environmental policy debate in the European Union.

Does professionalization vary across interest group type? Even though an empirical assessment of interest group professionalization is crucial to understand their potential for enhancing the democratic legitimacy of the European Union, little is known about the internal configuration of interest groups. Although some argue that professionalization differs systematically across interest group type, others suggest that institutional pressures lead to converging professionalization patterns, so that cause groups and sectional groups are similarly professionalized. However, these assertions are based on case studies focusing only on a small number of interest groups, which makes it difficult to draw general conclusions. To overcome this important shortcoming, we provide an empirical analysis of professionalization patterns that is based on a comprehensive survey conducted among a wide variety of interest groups. Our findings indicate that professionalization patterns do not vary systematically across interest group type. By contrast, cause groups and sectional groups are similarly professionalized.