Why the environment might not be the textbook example of a valence issue Alexia Katsanidou * Kostas Gemenis † Paper prepared for the 2010 EPOP Conference, University of Essex, 10–12 September 2010. Abstract It has been often argued that the issues relating to the environment and its protection can be best characterised as valence issues. Accord- ing to this argument, all political parties endorse the same position and differ only on the degree in which they emphasise it. In this pa- per we challenge the conventional wisdom that parties approach the environment from a valence issue perspective. To support our claim, we triangulate among different bodies of empirical evidence: quantita- tive and qualitative analyses of party manifestos and political text, as well as expert and mass survey data. Our findings suggest that there are significant differences in the ways parties approach environmen- tal issues and that, by taking into account these differences, we can effectively distinguish the environmental from the anti-environmental parties. * GESIS, Cologne, Germany,e-mail: katsanidou@gmail.com. † Department of Political Science and Research Methods, University of Twente, The Netherlands, e-mail: k.gemenis@utwente.nl. 1