ARE GREEN POLITICAL PARTIES MORE POST-MATERIALIST THAN OTHER PARTIES?

ABSTRACT

Among other social and political changes, post-materialist theory anticipated the need to strengthen democracy in political institutions in post-industrial societies. This change in political values would mean that in addition to growth in post-materialist values, parties would be pushed to take an alternative view of politics that would entail greater assimilation of democratic procedures. This paper partially and empirically tests the validity of this explanation in four European party systems. The Greens are the focus, since they are considered the parties that best fit the post-materialist profile. In particular, the paper aims to ascertain whether the Greens display a significantly better positioning in respect to support for democracy and the congruence of their voters than other parties, as theory leads us to believe. The explanation of higher levels of party congruence is also expected to be related to post-materialist party features. The findings of this research did not show enough evidence to validate our theoretical expectations.

Keywords:

• post-materialism
• Greens
• left-right
• democracy
• congruence

Acknowledgements

This article is a developed version of a paper presented at the Conference of the Belgian Association of Political Science (April 2008). The author wishes to thank José M. Leite Viegas, Stefaan Fiers, Jaoques Daloz and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions.

Notes

¹The first hypothesis is that people basically favour scarce goods. Those who have experienced war and economic difficulties favour peace and material well-being. Those who have had peace and prosperity favour quality of life. The second is that the priorities of individual values are consolidated essentially at the time of primary socialization. The author initially explained this process of change in light of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, though this reference has disappeared in more recent works.

²New movements and political parties also appeared to the right (Offe 1988: 233; Minkenberg and Inglehart 1989).

³Essentially because MPs and voters see politics differently, which explains why the distribution of both types of players on the same scale are different (e.g., voters systematically show greater dispersion than MPs) (Achen 1978: 805–15; Pierce 1999: 13–5).

⁴Similar to other research MPs also include parliamentary candidates (Schmitt and Thomassen 1999: 17–9).

⁵The questions were:

Party identification: ‘To which party do you feel closest?’ (v105 EES).Post-materialist index: as suggested by its author (Inglehart 1998: Appendix 4) (y002 WVS and v31a-31b EMP).Left-right self-positioning: ‘In political matters people talk of “the left” and “the right”. How would you place your views on this scale?’ (v114 EES and v14_1 EMP).Education: respondents that left full-time education aged 23 or over are considered to have higher education (v345 EES). Only MPs with a university degree are considered to have it (v38 EMP).Party attachment: ‘Do you consider yourself to be close to any particular party? (if yes) Do you feel yourself merely a sympathiser to this party, fairly close to this party or to be very close?’ (v103 EES).

⁶The question was: ‘How satisfied are you, on the whole, with the way democracy works in (country)?’ (scale: 1 – very satisfied; 4 – not at all satisfied) (v18 EMP, v144 EES). To voters' party identification: ‘Which party did you vote for at the last “General Election”?’ (v91_bel, v91_fra, v91_wge, v91_ege, v91_lux – EES).

⁷ Centrism measures how representatives actually represent the political preferences of their mean or median voters. Centrism is measured by the difference between the proximity and the variance with regard to the position of the electorate (Achen 1978: 483–8). Thus,measures the variance for the electorate, where is the median position of the voters; andis the measure of the centrism in party j. In this, proximity relates to the similarity of the party's position to that of its voters. That is: aij being the position of voter ai in party j, rj the mean position of the elite in that party, and nj the size of the sample.

⁸On this subject see e.g., Dalton (1985: 285–94); Wessel (1999); Belchior (2007: Chap.5).