📄 social_science

Reinterpreting the Transition: A Text-Analytic Approach to Territorial Political Agendas in Spain’s Multilevel Climate Governance

Using structural topic modeling of over 10,000 parliamentary speeches from Spain's Autonomous Communities, this paper demonstrates that multilevel climate governance triggers "political reinterpretation," where statewide parties systematically adapt their environmental agendas to local territorial contexts, often prioritizing regional incentives over national organizational uniformity.

Original authors: Onsel Gurel Bayrali, Yasemin Irepoglu Carreras

Published 2026-08-27

📖 5 min read🧠 Deep dive

CC BY 4.0

Original authors: Onsel Gurel Bayrali, Yasemin Irepoglu Carreras

Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). ✨ This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer

In the modern world, solving big problems like climate change rarely happens in a single room. Instead, it unfolds across a complex web of governments, where international bodies set broad goals, national leaders write the laws, and local regions carry out the work. This system is known as multilevel governance. The idea is that by sharing authority, different levels of government can work together to implement a unified plan. For years, researchers studying this system have focused on how well these different levels coordinate, how strictly they follow the rules, and whether the final policies get built and enforced. The assumption has been that once a common goal, such as reducing carbon emissions, is agreed upon, everyone stays on the same page, simply adjusting the details of how to get there.

However, this view overlooks a crucial step that happens before any policy is actually built. It assumes that the political meaning of a goal remains fixed as it travels from the national capital to the regional parliaments. In reality, the people who debate these issues in different regions face different local realities. A region dependent on farming has different concerns than a region built around heavy industry or dense cities. The question researchers are now asking is whether these local pressures cause politicians to change the very way they talk about and prioritize environmental goals. Do they keep the national message intact, or do they reshape it to fit their local audience?

A team of researchers set out to answer this question by looking at Spain, a country with a unique political structure. Spain is divided into seventeen autonomous regions, each with its own parliament and significant power over environmental policy, yet all are governed by the same major political parties that compete across the entire country. The researchers wanted to see if these national parties, when speaking in different regions, stuck to a single national script or if they adapted their message to local needs. To find out, they did not look at laws or budgets, but at the words spoken by politicians. They gathered a massive collection of 10,564 speeches delivered in the regional parliaments between 2019 and 2024. These were not just any speeches, but specifically those discussing the transition to a greener economy, identified by keywords related to climate change, energy transition, and the European Green Deal.

Using a method that allows computers to find patterns in large amounts of text without pre-set categories, the researchers mapped out the main themes of these debates. They discovered that the conversation about the green transition in Spain is not a single, uniform story. Instead, it breaks down into five distinct political dimensions. Some regions focus heavily on the rules and institutions needed to make the transition happen. Others prioritize the economic opportunities of green investment and modernization. In agricultural areas, the debate centers on how farmers and rural livelihoods will be affected. In arid regions, the discussion turns to water scarcity and managing natural resources. Finally, some areas focus on the technical shift to renewable energy and industrial transformation.

The most striking finding emerged when the researchers compared how these themes were discussed by the same political party in different regions versus how different parties discussed them in the same region. If national party identity were the strongest force, one would expect a party to sound the same everywhere, and for different parties in the same city to sound very different from each other. The data showed the exact opposite. The way a single party talked about environmental issues changed more when it moved from one region to another than it changed when comparing different parties sitting in the same parliament. For example, a party might emphasize water management when speaking in a dry region but focus on industrial jobs when speaking in an industrial one, even though the party's national leadership remained the same.

This pattern held true even for the major statewide parties that have a strong incentive to keep a consistent national message. The researchers found that the local political context was a stronger driver of what politicians chose to highlight than the party's national identity. In regions where agriculture is the main industry, the debate shifted to the costs and adjustments for farmers. In regions facing drought, the focus moved to water governance. The national parties did not abandon their core beliefs, but they allowed the local economic and environmental realities to dictate which parts of the green transition were most urgent to discuss.

The study suggests that the political meaning of climate action is not fixed at the moment a law is passed. Instead, it is constantly reconstructed as it enters different local arenas. Before a policy is ever implemented, its priorities are reshaped by the specific pressures of the region where it is debated. This means that understanding how climate governance works requires looking beyond just the coordination of rules. It requires recognizing that the same national goal can carry different political weights and meanings depending on where it is discussed. The research indicates that in decentralized systems, the pressure to respond to local voters often outweighs the pressure to maintain a uniform national brand, leading to a patchwork of political agendas that reflect the diverse landscapes of the country itself.

Technical Summary: Reinterpreting the Transition

Problem and Theoretical Framework
Existing literature on multilevel climate governance has predominantly focused on coordination, implementation, and compliance, operating under the assumption that environmental objectives remain politically stable once adopted by supranational or national bodies. This paper challenges that assumption, arguing that multilevel governance does not merely distribute the implementation of a fixed agenda but actively reshapes the political content of the environmental transition itself.

The authors introduce the concept of political reinterpretation: the process by which common climate objectives are selectively reprioritized and reframed as they enter territorially distinct political arenas. The central hypothesis (H1) posits that territorial incentives—driven by local economic structures, distributive concerns, and environmental conditions—can outweigh the integrative pressures of statewide party organizations. Consequently, the variation in environmental priorities within a single statewide party across different regions should exceed the variation between different parties competing within the same region.

Methodology
The study employs a text-analytic approach using Structural Topic Modeling (STM) to analyze parliamentary discourse in Spain, a "quasi-federal" unitary state with significant regional autonomy.

Data Corpus: The analysis utilizes a filtered corpus of 10,564 parliamentary speeches delivered across Spain's 17 Autonomous Communities (ACs) between 2019 and 2024. This subset was derived from a larger dataset of approximately 670,000 speeches using a dictionary-based filter targeting specific climate-transition vocabulary (e.g., "European Green Deal," "decarbonization," "energy transition").
Topic Modeling: The authors estimated STM models with varying topic counts ( $K=8, 10, 12$ $K = 8, 10, 12$ ). A 10-topic model was selected based on interpretability and stability. After excluding topics reflecting linguistic variation (Catalan, Basque, Galician) rather than substantive policy dimensions, the analysis identified five substantive dimensions of environmental-transition discourse:
1. Environmental Governance: Regulation, implementation, and institutional coordination.
2. Energy Transition Management: Renewable energy, industrial transformation, and decarbonization.
3. Green Development and Investment: Public funding, innovation, and modernization.
4. Agricultural Adjustment: Impacts on farmers, rural livelihoods, and distributive costs.
5. Resource and Territorial Management: Water, drought, forestry, and natural resource governance.
Measurement Strategy: The core empirical test compares two metrics for each party-region observation:
- Within-party territorial deviation ( $d_{within}$ ): The distance between a party's discourse in a specific region and its own national average profile.
- Between-party regional deviation ( $d_{between}$ ): The distance between a party's discourse in a specific region and the average profile of all statewide parties in that same region.
Statistical Testing: The authors test H1 by comparing the mean of $d_{within}$ against $d_{between}$ for each of the five dimensions. A one-sided Wilcoxon signed-rank test is used on the paired differences ( $\delta = d_{within} - d_{between}$ ), with Holm-Bonferroni adjustments applied to control for multiple comparisons.

Key Results
The analysis yields three primary findings:

Territorial Differentiation of Agendas: Environmental transition is not debated uniformly. Regions prioritize dimensions based on local economic structures. For instance, agricultural regions (Andalusia, Extremadura) emphasize Agricultural Adjustment, while arid regions (Murcia, Castile-La Mancha) focus on Resource and Territorial Management.
National Party Homogeneity vs. Regional Heterogeneity: At the national level, the four major statewide parties (PSOE, PP, Vox, Ciudadanos) display remarkably similar environmental profiles, with Environmental Governance being the dominant dimension for all.
Evidence of Political Reinterpretation: The statistical tests consistently support H1. For all five dimensions, the within-party territorial deviation is significantly greater than the between-party regional deviation.
- The largest differences are observed in Resource and Territorial Management ( $\delta = 0.046$ ) and Agricultural Adjustment ( $\delta = 0.040$ ), indicating these dimensions are most sensitive to local context.
- Even Environmental Governance, which is less tied to specific distributive stakes, shows significant territorial variation ( $\delta = 0.038$ ).
- These results hold even for parties with strong organizational incentives to maintain national coherence, suggesting that territorial context shapes political salience more than party ideology does.

Contributions and Significance
The paper claims to advance the literature in three specific ways:

Shifting the Focus to Agenda Formation: It moves the scholarly focus from policy implementation and compliance to the political formation of agendas. It demonstrates that political contestation over the meaning of environmental transition occurs before implementation, as common objectives are reconstructed in regional arenas.
Reframing Multilevel Governance: It argues that multilevel governance is not solely a coordination problem regarding the allocation of responsibilities. Instead, it shapes political prioritization, where the same policy objective acquires different political weights depending on the territorial arena, independent of coordination outcomes.
Territorial vs. Organizational Incentives: It provides empirical evidence that territorial incentives can systematically outcompete organizational pressures for national uniformity. This challenges the view that statewide parties act as monolithic ideological units, showing instead that they adapt their environmental discourse to local political economies even when their organizational structure favors national consistency.

Limitations and Scope
The authors explicitly note three limitations:

The study measures political discourse (speeches), not enacted policy, budgets, or regulatory output.
The findings are confined to the Spanish institutional context. While the theoretical logic is argued to apply to other systems (e.g., Germany's Länder), the paper does not empirically verify the theory in other jurisdictions.
The design identifies systematic patterns consistent with political reinterpretation but does not isolate the specific causal mechanisms (e.g., specific economic shocks or voter pressures) driving the variation.

The paper concludes that understanding climate governance in decentralized systems requires attention not only to how policies are implemented but to how their political meaning is reconstructed as authority becomes territorially dispersed.

Technical Summary: Reinterpreting the Transition

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