Here and Now or There and Then? The Psychological Distance of Climate Change in Parliamentary Speech

[Under Review]

Abstract

When politicians describe climate change as a threat to future generations in faraway places, they render it abstract; when they speak of floods at home and livelihoods at stake today, they bring it close. Experimental research shows this distinction matters: proximate framing increases concern and support for action, but these literatures rarely speak to each other. What determines whether a legislator chooses to proximise? I address this question using over 35,000 European Parliament speeches from 2014 to 2024, classifying whether legislators mention environmental impacts, frame them as specific or universal, and situate them as proximate or distant. Gender and left-right ideology emerge as the most consistent predictors: female and left-leaning legislators discuss impacts more frequently and frame them as closer. Legislators respond to domestic climate salience, but EU integration position does not shape climate rhetoric. The paper shows that generative language models can efficiently label training data for fine-tuned classifiers.