Party Discourse on Environmental Issues on Social Media in Portugal

Ana Margarida Barreto, Jorge Martins Rosa and Ilo Alexandre

IAMCR 2025, thematic session «POL-4 POL: Environmental Politics and Communication», Singapore, July 15 2025. Unpublished oral communication.

This article focuses on the appropriation by political parties of environmental issues in their political speeches, in an online social network (Facebook), in a period of one year.
Three study factors (and their intersections) were taken into account: the sender (the party, its ideological nature and its age), the message content (format and theme), and the response of the receivers to the message (emotional symbols or emojis, shares and comments).
The results suggest that the parties that define themselves as ecologists (PEV and PAN) make the greatest contribution of posts on environmental issues. This is followed by the predominance of the left in posts about the climate. Despite its very limited expression, CDS-PP stands out among the right-wing parties. Still, themes about the environment are not very relevant for the major parties (PS and PSD). The two new right-wing parties, although fringe, are hardly relevant to this accounting.
As to the most discussed topics, Pollution is the most frequent category, closely followed by Climate Change, Forest Protection, Ocean and River Protection. The least discussed topics are Agriculture and Sustainability. While Pollution, Forest Protection, Ocean and River Protection are the most common themes in older parties (with the exception of BE and PSD), Climate Change seems to be more typical of the new parties’ discourse. In fact, Climate Change is not the only topic that is rarely addressed in right-wing parties – other topics do not even arise, contrary to what happens with left-wing parties.

Regarding the response of users, PAN achieves the highest engagement values (and, conversely, the PEV is, despite the number of posts, the most notorious «almost absent» in the posts with the most engagement).Posts of the so-called center parties (PS and PPD/PSD) occupy the last places. It should be noted that Chega, despite only having 2 posts on climate issues, has both posts in the Top 5 of engagement. Note the presence of BE and PCP, but with only one post each in the Top 5 (BE) or Top 20 (PCP). Reactions (like, sad, angry or love) are the metric that most contributes to engagement. Leaving aside Likes (the most common reaction) it is worth noting the significant weight of Sad and Angry. Love is quite consistently the second most common reaction after Like, but in this case there are a few categories — especially Ocean & River Protection and Climate Change — where Love is overtaken by these two. Climate change represents the content that generates most comments from users, regardless of the party that publishes the post.