The Politics of Vulnerability: How the Environmental Context Drive Issue Salience in Legislative Speech in Italy

Environmental policies are multifaceted and involve long-term considerations. Implementing these policies often entails immediate economic costs for constituencies, while their positive environmental outcomes may not be immediately apparent. This statement is particularly evident in risk-reduction policies, where public awareness often emerges only after experiencing the consequences of environmental vulnerabilities through catastrophic events. In this regard, research consistently demonstrates an increase in public and party attention to environmental issues in the aftermath of such events, facilitating the approval of mitigation policies. Following this stream of research, this study aims to investigate how constituency-level contextual environmental and economic factors influence parliamentarians' attention to environmental issues. Assuming a primary motivation for re-election, we hypothesize that legislators may feel incentivised to address environmental concerns due to their constituency service responsibilities. However, economic considerations may limit the emphasis on this topic. In particular, we expect that higher environmental risks will lead to more legislative attention, but economic factors may moderate this effect. To investigate this relationship, we focus on Italy, one of the countries most exposed to environmental risk. We analyse speeches from the 18th Legislature (2018-2022), employing semi-supervised text analysis techniques to measure legislators' attention to environmental issues. Building on a novel database, we control for constituency-level environmental factors, including environmental quality and climate-related risks. Given the escalating frequency and severity of extreme climate events, this study contributes to a critical understanding of the factors driving political attention to environmental issues, which is crucial for successfully adopting effective mitigation policies.