Why have Green Parties made such a small impact on party systems? – Investigation of Green Parties in UK, Germany and Sweden

In Europe, the Green Parties (Greens) began to take shape in the 1970s and 1980s as a “new social movement” campaigning against the supposed unsustainability and exploitative nature of growth-oriented economic development sought parliamentary representation. Their post-materialist values focus on less emphasis on material goods, more individualism, self-realization and self-determination. Mobilized masses favoured quality of life instead of the standard of living and this set their agenda in opposition to nuclear power, anti-militarism and anti-discrimination (Bale, 2005, p.116). Issues like air and water pollution and the preservation of scarce resources have entered the political debate and have politicised opinions mainly among younger, middle class and urban highly-educated in United Kingdom, Germany and Sweden (UGS). This essay will cover Green parties in the mentioned three different countries and how they affected the party systems.

Before continuing the essay a key concept, party system, has to be defined.
Most democracies have many parties, and each country has it own unique combination of them. Nonetheless, parties of democratic countries have two major features in common. Firstly, they often group into party-families and secondly they form party systems. Since large parties are built upon political cleavages, there is a connection between the number of cleavages and the number of parties (Bale, 2007, p.225). Nations with one main cleavage –usually class – tend to have two main parties, one on the centre-left and one on the centre-right. Nations with two main cleavages – class and religion for example – tend to have three main parties, one to represent the middle class and its main religion, and two others to represent the working class and its different religious or secular values. According to Inglehart, (1977) historically formed party identifications affect the average voter when the individual deciding whether to vote “Left” or “Right” that furthermore has an impact on the Green parties electoral success. This association between the number of cleavages and parties is expressed by the formula:
P = C + 1
Where P stand for the number of parties and C, for the number of cleavages.
Because there is usually room only for one party to articulate one side of a cleavage, we rarely find more than one large party at the same side (Bale, 2007). Green Parties in most scenarios are “new social” movements closer to the Social Democrats or other established left-wing parties.
Hague (2007) distinguish between three different forms of party systems. In Japan for instance the dominant party systems exist were only one predominant party is in control and in USA or UK “two party system” is the current structure were one party, form a government. Last, in a “multi-party system” smaller parties compete to form coalition government with a common goal, such as reaching above 50 percents majority like in Sweden or Germany. As we can see in the first two scenarios, minority parties like the Greens, have difficulties and limited possibilities to influence. The UK is a primary example of this.
Like Duvarger (1954), Kirchheimer (1979) was concerned with a contrast between two types of parties. He referred to the “mass integration party” on the one hand, and the new “catch-all-party” on the other. Kirchheimer continues and argue that the West European systems face more or less an irresistible rise of the catch-all-party with characteristics like: drastic reduction of party’s ideological baggage, downgrading the role of the individual party member and de-emphasis on the social-class in favour, to recruit voters among the population at large (Mair, 1990, p.5). On the other hand these characteristics are clearly against the environmentalist movement thoughts and ideas. Their ideological core values were established party families by their ecologically oriented disposition, an anti professional, participatory and decentralised attitude towards party organization, and a close link to the new social movements in 1960s (Burchell, 2002, p.43). They established firstly on local level debating about parks and cycle-tracks but furthermore emerged as an opposition to nuclear power-plants, NATO’s stationing of cruise-missiles and antiwar movement that a few years later entered National governments with a common goal to change people’s perspectives (Müller-Rommel and Poguntke, 2002).

Why is value change taking place? According to Inglehart (1977) it seems to be linked with a cluster of socio-economic changes including rising levels of education, shifts in the occupational structure, and the development of increasingly broad and effective mass communications networks (Mair, 1990, p.248). In short, people are safe and they have enough to eat. These two basic needs have far-reaching implications. Abraham Maslow (1954) argues that people act to fulfil a number of different needs, which are particularly connected with enough food supplies and economic security. When these requirements are fulfilled then other needs become increasingly important. Environmental issues has high priority when the basic needs are fulfilled and in this case it is clear that during the 1980s after the nuclear reactors exploded 1986 in Chernobyl, people in UGS got reminded of the importance of the survival of nature. At the same time “caring-services” such as health and education was produced and therefore a generation with its basic needs satisfied led people to pursue “higher order” values beyond the satisfaction of material wants (Eatwell and Wright, 1999, p.233).
Furthermore, post-material thoughts emerged during this period and it clearly affected the success of the Green Parties in UGS. The Swedish Miljöpartiet (Green party), gained in 1988 election 5,5% (20 seats), and in Germany Die Grünen gained 8,3% (44 seats) of the national vote. In UK the Green party received an impressive 14,9%. But did this have any impact on the party system?

In order to evaluate this claim we must understand the vital role the electoral system has on the success of the Green parties in each country. In single-member district systems such as the UK, and even in single-member portion of the German electoral system, Green parties have been able to elect only a handful of members to the lower houses. In the most recent German Bundestag elections, the Green party only managed to capture one seat through the districted electoral-method. However, Die Grünen, was more successful in the PR portion of the electoral system (Adams, 2003, p.15).
The general election of 1993 and the European election of 1994 brought low electoral support which was likely a consequence of the British majority electoral system, where smaller and minority parties stand hardly any chance of winning seats in the National parliament but also discourages people to vote for the Greens because the vote may be wasted (Müller-Rommel, 1994). In 1989, in the European election, the British Greens gained surprisingly 10,4% of the votes but no seat. So the question lies if there is a possibility that minority parties will ever affect the party system in UK were the system is designed to minimize small parties impact and participation in order to provide strong government (Adams, 2003, p.17). The Green party at the time was the third largest party with 20,000-strong party membership but still ended with zero seats in the lower house (Talshir, 2002, p.225).
Nonetheless, in PR system in Sweden for instance, the Green Miljöpartiet gained 5,5% of the parliamentary presence and was not large enough to cause government difficulties for the ruling Social Demokraterna party and Vansterpartiet that, gained above 50% of the majority votes in 1988 election (Rihoux and Rüdig, 2006).
Political success in this case is defined as Green parties concentration in a national parliament measured by the proportion of “Green seats” in relation to the total seats in a national government. Furthermore, for the strategy of the Green parties focusing on vote-seeking, office-seeking and policy-seeking the challenge depends on four characteristics; tolerating a minority-government without taking office like in Sweden, and co-opted into government and sometimes remained there without showing any strong Green presence and, participation in pre-coalition to secure seats and last, post-electoral negotiating position (Rihoux and Rüdig, 2006). The Green Parties in UGS took over large established parties traditional role of “normal life” as human rights advocate, women’s programme, internationalism, unilateral disarmament, ecology and ecology. This shift of emphasis towards a strong profile as a social-justice party was to dominate Green politics and creating a role for them in UK, Sweden and Germany (Talshir, 2002). This post-materialistic way of thinking mobilized large groups in each country and generated support rapidly.

Having established that the Green Parties in these three countries completed successful elections in the late 1980s problems was yet to occur. A small party, representing powerful and dominant interests in society is likely to be treated differently than a party representing interests that are considered marginal. The core identity of the Greens defines them as defenders of the public interests without a well-defined constituency: everybody benefits from the protection of the global environment and, paradoxically following the logic of collection actions, this should mean that the Greens would have difficulty mobilizing support for the public good. But, during the 1990s environmental issues emerged as mainstream thoughts and in “multi party” systems parties changed strategy and became “catch-all-parties” and the environmental issues were taken into account on the political agenda. Clearly, as a consequence of this, the outcome was that Green Parties in UGS perceived lack of responsiveness and could either fundamentally change their policy approach and transform their party away from their ideological core values like in Germany or like the Swedish Miljöpartiet who remained a grass-roots, decentralised and confederated organisation that was unable to translate popular support into electoral success and existed without any alignment with the “left” parties (Müller-Rommel, 1994). An outcome of this is that, decentralized, grass-roots parties seem unable to manage sustained viability in the face of large, national, centralized, and catch-all parties that are capable of governing, providing a single national party-label and list of candidates, and raise money to advertise, campaign and compete (Adams, 2003).

No Green party in Sweden or UK have played such a vital role in the party system as Die Grünen in Germany. The centralizing reforms of the Green Party, including providing a single national Green party leader in Joschka Fischer, provided the mechanism that allowed the Greens to form a coalition government with the SPD under Schröder (Adams, 2003). Without the centralized and unified party structure of the Die Grünen, the SPD could not definitely count upon maintaining its coalition with the Greens and would have had to seek out a coalition with the Free Democrats. The party had never before played an role at a federal level just because it abandoned any notion of pushing for a radical, paradigmatic policy change like ecological proposals that had survived in the party since the beginning (Müller-Rommel and Poguntke, 2002). The important point here is that before 1998, government change in post-war Germany had always involved change of coalition partner. Instead, government change had meant that one government coalition-partner dropped out to be replaced by another. In the past, the liberal FDP had been able to decide which larger party it was prepared to heave into government and the Greens had potentially threatened the FDP’s monopoly (Müller-Rommel and Poguntke, 2002). The interesting part here is that a Green party had disrupted the party system. Usually Germany consisted of a three party system and the Liberal democrats formed a coalition with either the Conservatives or Labour, but now a fourth party destroyed the party system (Blüdorn, pers. Comm., 15th April 2008). On the other hand this happened only during the 1998 election but still not to forget was that, a Green party that was forced to take a broader range of policy ideas and programs to maintain their existence actually had an impact on government participation and party system. Moreover, the electoral support halved and the Greens suffered he gravest political crisis in their history.
Green parties on the other hand find difficulties in the UK because of the electoral system but in Germany and Sweden because of the 5% and 4% threshold that exist to keep extremist parties away. Sartori (1976) argues that “the critical factor in altering the nature of a party system and in bringing about its structural consolidation is the appearance of the mass party” and by this it is clear that catch-allism to maximise parties vote-seeking make, voters affiliate with larger established parties instead of the Greens (Mair, 1990). Despite the rapid expansion of environmental issues and awareness that increased in the electoral support in UK in the late 1980s, the Green Party was still isolated from the party system. The Labour and Conservatives incorporated environmental issues into their political agenda instead of forming a relationship with the Green Party (Burchell, 2002). An example of this was in 1988 when Thatcher held and speech to the Royal Society and introduced a White Paper entitled Our Common Inheritance which would “set the environmental agenda until the end of the century” (ibid). Similar assimilation of green issues into the platform of catch-all parties role existed in Germany and Sweden as well.

Probably the greatest threat to all post-material parties in UGS is the domination of political system by the traditional left-centre-right catch-all parties. These parties with strong national, regional, and local organization, large fundraising capabilities, professionalized campaign staffs and often favoured by electoral laws constitute the greatest threat to post-materialist parties (Adams, 2003). Fischer in Germany solved this when he transformed the Greens and for the first time the Die Grünen received 50,000 D-Mark from the state (Müller-Rommel and Poguntke, 2002).

In order to affect the party system the party needs to gain votes. Without votes a party wont gain seats in the government. For a Green party to generate votes it has to be a public mainstream support like, the anti-nuclear movement during the 1980s or as today global warming in order to mobilize masses. Voters on the other hand look for other policies on the political agenda and if Green parties are not willing to transform its agenda like SPD in Germany then the Green party will loose electoral support. But, changing core values also affect core-voters like the young, middle-class and rural high-educated. Whatever the parties strategy will be the catch 22 situation will occur.
Green parties cannot on the other hand rule the government by itself because lack of support so this ever-ending searches for a coalition partner will dominate the agenda setting. Despite problems like thresholds and electoral systems the post-material thought may still play a significant role in UGS because of the media coverage.

Not surprisingly, green economics is characterised as no-growth economics as in the society we live in today were profit maximisation is key to success has furthermore lead to that people do not vote for Green Parties because their political agenda do not fulfil their basic needs. Electoral votes are keys for Green parties if they should make any impact on a party system. But, in UK, Germany and Sweden the electoral system, thresholds, and catch-allism has played a major role for the Greens electoral results. The environmental protection movement has gained massive support and mobilized groups and the outcome of this has lead to that mass-parties has implemented these ideas in their political agenda and as Kirshheimer’s “catch-all-parties” system has affected Green parties electoral support negatively. In order for Green parties to maintain their support and responsiveness in UGS, the party has to transform and centralize to generate and maximise electoral votes. Green political parties, pressure groups and media coverage have certainly made an impact, as have exhortations to change lifestyles either in home or in sustainable communities in UGS but yet, party system structure, “lost vote” syndrome, electoral system, high thresholds, kidnapping of green agenda, industrialism and profit maximisation remains the practise across most of the planet therefore, has not Green parties made an impact on party system.