Uneven transitions: Measuring parliamentary engagement with just transition across European political economies

This article examines how national parliaments engage with the concept of a just transition in the context of low-carbon transformation. Although the importance of addressing the social and distributional consequences of climate policy is increasingly recognised, the conditions under which such concerns enter political debate remain unclear. To bridge this gap, the study develops an original measure of parliamentary engagement with just transition themes based on computational text analysis of legislative debates across sixteen European countries: the Just Transition Index. The measure is constructed using transformer-based classification models enhanced through synthetic data augmentation and active learning, enabling the scalable and systematic identification of just transition discourse. The analysis tracks the prominence of just transition themes over time and across countries, revealing substantial cross-national variation linked to political economy characteristics, including institutional configurations and degrees of economic dependence on fossil-based sectors. The findings suggest that pursuing a just transition is not simply a matter of policy choice, but a process conditioned by structural features that influence how distributional conflicts are managed within political systems. By linking parliamentary discourse to political economy structures, the article shows that the integration of justice considerations into climate policy debates depends on the institutional and economic contexts in which policymakers operate, contributing to scholarly debates on the governance of low-carbon transitions.