Green Parties as Programmatic Parties: Substantive Gains & Electoral Success

• In Event: Environmentalism and (Green) Party Politics in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

The literatures on political parties and social movements have rarely intersected. This is curious, given the obvious links between some social movements and the political parties they produce (McAdam/Tarrow 2013). One key question that remains unanswered is why some parties that originate in social movements are better at generating support at the ballot box than others. This paper examines the electoral success of a prominent group of movement parties – West European Green Parties.

In adding to previous work that explained Green Party success by focusing on the social structure of the electorate and the political opportunity structure (e.g. Kitschelt 1988; Dolezal 2010), this paper explicitly takes the behavior of the Green Parties themselves into account. I hypothesize that the electoral success of movement parties is due to the substantive (i.e. policy) gains as well as the procedural gains (i.e. government participation) that they are able to achieve (Kitschelt 2006). Between these two types of gains, delivering on the substantive dimension should be the key factor. Having their origin in social movements, these parties are likely to attract supporters that evaluate parties mainly on programmatic terms and their success in delivering policy change.

However, the effect of substantive gains will interact with procedural gains, since government participation is the main opportunity to access the means for accomplishing programmatic goals. Parties that are able to deliver on both dimensions are expected to be most successful, while parties that fail in providing substantive gains but at the same time enjoy the payoffs of procedural gains should be the least successful.

Based on a dataset of Green Party success for 18 parties in 14 countries spanning the 1973-2007 period and 93 elections for a total of 107 observations, I test these hypotheses with the help of a pooled cross-sectional time series dataset. The empirical analysis finds clear support for the hypotheses. The most successful Green Parties deliver substantive gains while being part of the government and parties that provide procedural without substantive gains are electorally heavily punished. That is, the results clearly identify Green Parties as programmatic parties and demonstrate that policy-seeking rather than office- or vote-seeking behavior, which many models in the Downsian tradition assume, is the key to electoral success for these parties.

The analysis also reveals that governments without Green Party participation that deliver on the latter’s policy demands are not successful in limiting the electoral appeal of Green Parties and that the programmatic dimension that is central to Green Party success is different from the traditional focus on material welfare.

Author

• Steffen Blings, Utah State University