  Prior research shows that public opinion on climate politics sorts along
partisan lines. However, they leave open the question of whether climate
politics and other politically salient issues exhibit tendencies for issue
alignment, which the political polarization literature identifies as among the
most deleterious aspects of polarization. Using a network approach and social
media data from the Twitter platform, we study polarization of public opinion
toward climate politics and ten other politically salient topics during the
2019 Finnish elections as the emergence of opposing groups in a public forum.
We find that while climate politics is not particularly polarized compared to
the other topics, it is subject to partisan sorting and issue alignment within
the universalist-communitarian dimension of European politics that arose
following the growth of right-wing populism. Notably, climate politics is
consistently aligned with the immigration issue, and temporal trends indicate
that this phenomenon will likely persist.
