Living in a Post-material World? Assessing the Impact of Economic and non-Economic Shifts on the Success of the German Greens

ABSTRACT

How does the state of the German economy influence the performance of the German Green Party? Investigating the strong correlation between Germany’s economic standing and the German Greens’ electoral results over the past two decades, this article tests the post-material contention that throughout the 21st Century, confidence in the economy has enabled citizens to more fully consider socio-cultural issues, including those key to the Greens’ political appeal, translating to stronger Green Party performance. Data from Politbarometer support this argument, showing that concern for key socio-cultural issues mediates and helps explain the relationship between satisfaction with the national economy and Green electoral performance over time. However, this trend does not hold when considering personal economic satisfaction, suggesting there are further considerations which impact how economic development influences the Greens’ performance.

Acknowledgements

This study was made possible thanks to funding provided by the German-American Fulbright Commission and the generosity and accommodations of the Heinrich Heine University, specifically the Institute for German and International Party Law and Party Research. I would like to thank the entire PRUF staff for their help and feedback. I would specifically like to thank my advisor, Dr. Heiko Beyer, as well as Dr. Thomas Poguntke and Dr. Gregor Zons for their assistance, advice, and supervision throughout the writing and editing process. I would also like to thank Dr. Andrei Markovits of the University of Michigan for helping facilitate my Fulbright Grant, encouraging my interest in German Politics, and more generally serving as an invaluable academic mentor. Finally, I would like to thank reviewers 1 and 2 for taking the necessary time and effort to review the paper. Their ideas and suggestions have allowed me to greatly improve the quality of this work.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In order to mitigate the potential negative impacts of using ordinal but non-binary variables in logit models, I also ran a test dichotomising the two dependent variables, views of national and personal economic well-being, to verify the validity of the results. Binomial variables fit better with the mechanics of a logit model, but do not capture as sophisticated a range of outcomes. To conduct this test, I dichotomised both respondents’ views of national and personal economic well-being by median. This eliminated the neutral responses, but divided the data as to still capture, proportionally, respondents’ overall sentiment. I then ran the exact same models as I do in the body of the paper.

On balance the results were overwhelmingly similar, validating the study design and suggesting the use of ordinal variables did not distort the findings in any way. The results of the logit models were all identical directionally and remained equally statistically significant, with only minor coefficient changes. The average marginal effects of the two binomial variables were comparable to those of the ordinal ones used in the study’s model as well. The mediation analysis was unsurprisingly also very similar. For Hypothesis A, it showed meaningful path effects and suggested that under the alternative model, about 7 per cent of the relationship between feelings of economic satisfaction and Green support could be attributed to concern for key socio-cultural issues. Meanwhile, the mediating path for Hypothesis B was again not well-supported, as there was again a negative correlation between the independent variable and mediator.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by German-American Fulbright Commission [grant number Research/study grant, USA to Germany].

Notes on contributors

Zack Blumberg

Zack Blumberg was a Fulbright Research Grantee at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany during the 2022–23 academic year. His research focuses on electoral shifts in Germany and the development of the German Green Party. Prior to undertaking his Fulbright, Blumberg graduated with High Honours from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. At Michigan, he studied political science and wrote a senior thesis, ‘Winning Hearts and Minds: An Evaluation of How Ideological and Material Factors Shape the British Public’s Positive and Normative Understanding of the EU’.