Why so few, and why so late? Green parties and the question of governmental participation

Abstract.  Green parties have been represented in the parliaments of European Union countries since 1981, but it was not until recently that a few have entered national governments. Using a data set comprised of 51 government formation opportunities (where the Greens were represented in parliament), the authors of this article show that the parties involved in these bargaining situations are more office-oriented than earlier studies had found. As Green parties are seen to be less office-seeking than other parties, this general tendency for office-seeking behaviour in government formation may partly account for the scarcity of Greens in government. Furthermore, a number of hypotheses derived from theories that account for the specific nature of Green parties in terms of their office-, policy- and vote-seeking orientations are tested. It is found that Greens participate in government when they have lost votes in at least one election, when the main party of the left identifies them as a clear electoral threat and when the policy distance between the Greens and either the formateur party or the main left party is small (the latter condition must be accompanied by a substantial proportion of seats for the Green party in parliament). As most of these simultaneous conditions only materialized recently, and in a few countries, it is argued that this analysis, which is the first comparative and multivariate test focused on this question, explains the scarcity and the delay of Green governmental participation.     

The Greens in Brussels: Shaping or shaped?

Abstract.  The challenge for contemporary Green parties in government is to demonstrate both that they have not been completely de-radicalised, and that their presence in government can make a difference. Green party involvement in the European Union (EU) adds distinctive elements to this challenge. Does engagement in supranational decision making provide new opportunities for Green parties to exercise influence beyond borders? Or does it simply further exacerbate de-radicalisation tendencies? Focusing on the German and Finnish Green parties, this article explores the 'European dimension' of Green parties' governmental incumbency. Three sets of literature (Europeanisation, party change and EU policy making) are used to derive and test several hypotheses related to the impact of EU involvement on Green parties, and the impact of Green parties on EU policy making. It is argued that EU governmental engagement has accelerated Green party de-radicalisation both organisationally and programmatically, but the dynamics of this process are complex and surprisingly interactive as Greens also attempt to exercise influence over EU policy. The findings are relevant not just for those studying Green parties, but for those exploring wider questions of Europeanisation, party change and EU policy making.     

Evolving or conforming? Assessing organisational reform within European green parties

This article provides a comparative analysis of organisational change within three European Green parties. By utilising an adaptation of Harmel and Janda's party change model, the author identifies the key factors impacting upon processes of organisational change within the Greens. It is argued that these changes reflect a process of evolution within the Green parties during which they have attempted to maintain a commitment to key ‘green ‘ goals and objectives whilst also seeking to become effective competitors within European party systems.     

Fertile soil: explaining variation in the success of Green parties

Comparative political science has largely ignored the marked cross-national variation in Green party electoral performance. This article uses a unique aggregate dataset of 347 parliamentary elections from 32 countries over the course of 45 years to test competing theories about the causes of Green party success. The findings show that voter demand, institutions and mainstream party strategy all affect the Green vote. Green parties do well in societies with post-materialist conflicts caused by high levels of wealth or the presence of a tangible environmental dispute. The article also shows that regional decentralisation helps Green parties, but electoral systems have little effect on their vote share. Most importantly, it demonstrates that the impact of mainstream party strategy on Green electoral strength is dependent on the age of the Green party. While mainstream parties can undermine young Green parties by adopting the environmental issue, this effect is reversed once the Greens have survived a number of elections. Thus ‘accommodative’ mainstream party strategies eventually boost the Green vote by increasing the salience of the key Green issue.     

Is government good for Greens? Comparing the electoral effects of government participation in Western and East-Central Europe

Abstract.  Examining the record of Green parties that have been involved in government at national level, two distinct pictures emerge. While the electoral fortunes of Green parties in East-Central Europe sharply declined after their stint in government, Green parties in Western Europe on the whole have not fared badly, with most experiencing gains in support. This article seeks to address the variety of factors that could account for different Green electoral fortunes. Among the approaches considered are economic voting, environmental issue salience, portfolio allocation, policy impact and strategic voting. While economic and environmental background factors clearly were important in the East-Central European cases, they are less useful in explaining variation between the West European experiences. The ability of Greens to improve their perceived policy competence and the profile of their leading politicians has helped them benefit from a period in office. Most crucially, Greens can benefit from strategic voting where a Green vote comes to represent support for the government as a whole. The main conclusion is that there are two paths to post-incumbency success: either Greens try to remain distant from taking full government responsibility, thus deflecting any electoral costs of incumbency, or they embrace government and the chance of demonstrating their competence fully to survive or fall with the government as a whole.     

The 2019 Swiss federal elections: the rise of the green tide

Abstract

The Greens made spectacular gains in the 2019 Swiss federal elections. In a campaign that was dominated by the climate change issue, the party outperformed the Christian Democrats to become the fourth largest party in the lower house. This status enabled the Greens to legitimately request a seat in government (the Federal Council). However, their attempt to unseat a member of the Liberals failed due to the resistance of the right-wing parties. It thus turned out that the Green wave was not strong enough to change the composition of the federal government.     

The rise and decline of new politics and the Greens in Sweden and Germany

Abstract. The failure of the Green parties at recent elections in Sweden and Germany makes it necessary to consider the future of 'new politics' in each country. With reference to modern organisation theory, the goal of this article is to explain the different character of the Green parties in both countries in terms of external political resources. Above all the features of new social movements on the one hand and the different party systems on the other are of particular importance. It is argued that both factors have an impact on the cleavage structure and social change in Sweden and Germany, as well as being important for the organizational survival of Green parties in both countries. The conclusion is that 'new politics' and the Greens have a more promising future in Germany than in Sweden.     

The green party in German politics

Among the parties emerging from the ‘new social movements’ in Western Europe, the German Green Party represents the most successful of the ‘new type’ parties so far. This article surveys the salient features of the party, its programme, strategy and organisational structure, showing the problems the party faces in all three respects. Attention is also paid to the nature of electoral support given to the Greens as well as to the impact the party is having on the established parties and the political system.     

Generational replacement and Green party support in Western Europe

Over the past decades, electoral support for Green parties has gradually increased in Western Europe, especially among young people. This begs the question whether there are systematic differences between generations in support for Green parties, and whether there are also life-cycle effects. We answer this question by separating age, period and cohort effects on Green party support using CSES data covering 40 elections in 11 Western European countries. We find that when controlling for period and age, each new generation is more supportive of the Greens than the generation before. We also find negative age effects. While Green parties can expect to benefit in the future from generational replacement, the consequences of aging societies are to their disadvantage.     

Green Politics: A Norwegian Experience1

Not until 1989 did a Green political party participate in a national election in Norway. The Greens, however, only received 0.4 percent of the votes, and won no seats. Does this indicate that ecology and environmental issues are of no importance in Norway? On the contrary, environmental concern has to a large extent been assimilated into the party platforms and the public. In the 1989 election, environmental issues ranked as the second most important for the voters. The electoral system makes it relatively easy to establish new parties, and also for new parties to win seats. Several new parties emerged after the divisive EC debate in the early 1970s. The Liberal Party, which split on the EC issue in 1973, deliberately tried to rebuild its platform by focusing on green issues. But the Liberal Party has to a large extent remained a one-issue party. Even though environmental issues were more prominent than ever before, the green Liberal Party did not succeed in winning a single seat in 1989. The Socialist Left Party, on the other hand, increased its number of seats from 6 to 17! Our analysis shows that environmental concern was not the decisive factor behind the voters preference for the Socialist Left Party as opposed to the Liberal Party. Left-right ideology was more important than environmental concern for the competition between these two parties. The data applied in this analysis are drawn from a long-standing programme of Electoral Research at the Institute for Social Research. The programme is directed by Henry Valen and Bernt Aardal.     

Regionalist Party Mobilisation on Immigration

This article explores the various ways in which regionalist parties approach the issue of immigration. Drawing on several cases, it compares how regionalist parties ‘construct’ the territory and how issues of diversity and immigration inform their policy goals. It is shown that mobilisation on immigration varies across regions. Whilst parties in Scotland and Catalonia have encouraged immigration as a way of expanding national membership and bolstering the labour market, those in Bavaria and Northern Italy have viewed immigration as a threat to their culture and economy. This article identifies factors influencing party immigration policies, including party ideology, local party competition, central government policy and other state-wide influences. It also assesses the extent to which European integration has influenced parties' territorial projects, in particular whether parties have responded to pressures to adopt EU norms and common principles, such as diversity and multiculturalism, in order to be perceived as credible.     

Power in the Swedish Parliament

This article is based on a mail questionnaire sent to members of the Swedish parliament (the Riksdag) in 1988. To increase our understanding of how the institution works, an analysis of members' perceptions of the distribution of power within the Riksdag is undertaken. Members were asked (1) how influential various groups and bodies are, and (2) how influential these groups and bodies should be. The results show that members want more power to be given to parliamentary party groups, committees and MPs as individuals, and less power to the party leaders and the chiefs of staff, Differences in perceptions along partisan lines are small. However, members of the Greens - an anti-establishment party - are more oriented toward strengthening the influence of individual MPs and toward weakening the power of party leaders than are members of the established parties.     

Die proportionale Ministerienaufteilung in deutschen Koalitionsregierungen: Akzeptierte Norm oder das Ausnutzen strategischer Vorteile?

In this paper, we corroborate Gamson’s Law for a data set including German coalition governments on the federal and Länder level. We further tackle the question of how to explain this regularity. Here, we conclude that it is not the bargaining power of parties resulting from seat distribution that could be able to explain Gamson’s Law. In fact, we identify Gamson’s Law as a behavioural norm which evolved over time in Germany. We finally confirm the conjecture that on average smaller parties profit and larger parties suffer from deviations from Gamson’s Law. However, there is also a strong party bias which is able to invert this effect for single parties as e. g. the Greens or the Party of Democratic Socialism. Further variables such as the size of the party system or the number of parties which form a coalition government can also explain some deviations from the Gamson’s Law.     

Where to go from here? Revamping electoral politics in the Netherlands

The transformation from mass parties into catch‐all parties may not only have electoral consequences, but may also have an impact inside political parties, particularly in so far as the position of ordinary party members is concerned. On the basis of Dutch research data, the role of the ordinary party member in intra‐party decision‐making is assessed in this article. The data show that Dutch party members do feel marginalised where their influence on intra‐party policy‐making is concerned. However, this is not because they feel they do not have sufficient opportunities to participate in internal decision‐making, but rather because they do not actually use the opportunities which are available: party members appear to marginalise themselves.     

The Green Breakthrough in Sweden

Based on survey data from the Swedish Election Studies Program, the green breakthrough in Sweden is assessed. In the parliamentary election of 1988, for the first time in 70 years, a new party, the Greens, succeeded in getting representation in the Swedish Riksdag . The future situation of the Greens is very precarious, however. The analysis shows that the party's voters tend to belong to highly volatile groups in the Swedish electorate (young, big city, white collar). Furthermore, the Greens have to confront many different issue publics on environmental issues since a coherent green dimension structuring ordinary people's opinions on environmental issues has not yet developed in Sweden. The alternative green dimension is still to a very large extent an elite phenomenon in Swedish politics.     

Analyzing Greens in power: Setting the agenda

Abstract.  What are the key questions that political scientists investigating Green parties in government have to address? What are the possible contributions of a variety of theories and approaches to the explanation of the Green governmental experience, in a cross-national context? The international experience with Green party governmental participation is reviewed, followed by a discussion of past work and future challenges to explain Green parties' entry into government, their performance in government, the impact of government on them, and the conditions for their survival in or exit from government.     

‘New politics’ in Finland: The greens and the left wing in the 1990s

This article examines the development of two Finnish political parties (the Green Association and the Left‐Wing Alliance) from a ‘New Politics’ perspective, focusing on changes in their electoral, programmatic and organisational profiles, with emphasis on the composition and value‐related features of their electorates in 1991, 1995 and 1999. The results confirm the position of the Greens as the prime representative of New Politics; but the party has moved away from its anti‐establishment role and its supporters increasingly share the social and attitudinal characteristics of the average electorate. The UNA, on the other hand, has moved towards a New Politics profile and a gradual dealignment of its old male‐dominated working class electorate; but its central characteristics and its supporters are still firmly entrenched in an old leftist format.     

Radical Right Populism in Sweden: Still a Failure,But for How Long?

Although radical right populist (RRP) parties were successful elsewhere in Western Europe during the 1990s, Denmark and Norway included, the Swedish RRP parties have been more or less failures. Besides the short-lived party New Democracy, which disappeared in 1994, no Swedish RRP party has managed to escape electoral marginalization. The main purpose of this article is to explain this failure. Such an explanation is approached by using explanatory factors identified from earlier research on RRP parties elsewhere. We find some factors that have worked against the emergence of a strong Swedish RRP party, namely: enduring class loyalties, especially for working-class voters; an enduring high salience of the economic cleavage dimension (and a corresponding low salience of the sociocultural cleavage dimension); a relatively low salience of the immigration issue; and finally, a low degree of convergence between the established parties in political space. However, we also find some important indicators that there may be an available niche for the emergence of a Swedish RRP party in the near future, namely: widespread popular xenophobia; a high level of discontent with political parties and other political institutions; and a potential available niche for an anti-EU party of the right. Hence, this article concludes that if a sufficiently attractive party emerges in Sweden, with a certain degree of strategic sophistication and without too visible an anti-democratic heresy, it might be able to attract enough voters to secure representation in the Swedish parliament.     

A Wider Range of Friends: Multi‐speed Organising during the 2015 Labour Leadership Contest

The British Labour party's recent adoption of a partially open primary for the selection of its leader conforms to a trend seen across many European political parties of increasing rights and privileges in internal party decision‐making and expanding opportunities for more loosely affiliated supporters to participate in party activity. This dual trend can be seen as a response to changes in the membership environment, greater individualisation of political participation and growth in social movement politics and online activism. Yet as much as parties are responding to a changed membership environment, they are also driving that change, increasingly blurring the distinction between members and supporters. This article examines the recent impact of this change within the British Labour party and argues that, in line with Susan Scarrow's theory of ‘multi‐speed’ membership, the Labour party's experiment in expanding affiliation options has led directly to a tension in locating the source of authority within the party, creating a challenge for its new leader in accommodating his new supporters within his party's representative traditions.     

Party Politics and the Common Good in Swedish Local Government

Local government in Sweden is usually classified as the northwest European type of local government, together with the local government systems of the other Nordic countries and Britain. In the 1990s and the early years of the new millennium, Swedish local government has been especially susceptible to the ideas of 'new public management' (NPM). At the same time there has been a long-ongoing trend of increasing party-politicisation of local councils. In this paper a selection of five local authorities are examined in order to see how party politics and party-politicisation are confronted by the new organisational doctrines. It is concluded that in this respect the doctrines guiding local government organisation can be characterised by three common traits: the legitimacy of particular interests is denied in favour of the common good of the locality; it is denied that conflict and competition between political parties perform any democratic function; finally, when it comes to the relation between politics and administration there is a common confession of the management-by-objectives doctrine. Somewhat surprisingly, these three principles guide organisation and politics not only in those authorities most enthusiastically adopting NPM but also in the authorities implementing organisational reforms based on more communitarian principles and even organisationally conservative municipalities not even considering any organisational change. One interpretation of this contradictory observation may be that NPM concepts and ideas have also found their way into local doctrines that are based on quite different principles. Another interpretation is that there is a consensus tradition in Swedish political culture that can also account for similar results in municipalities not explicitly introducing an apolitical organisation doctrine.