Two shades of Green? The electorates of GreenLeft and the Party for the Animals

Abstract

The Netherlands has two electorally significant parties that might be considered to be part of the ‘Green’ family: GreenLeft and the Party for the Animals. These two parties appeal to different niches of the Green electorate, identified on the basis of issue dimensions, demographics, and their trust in government. GreenLeft tends to attract voters from the traditional Green niche: those with egalitarian, cosmopolitan, environmentalist, and libertarian values. The Party for the Animals attracts another type of Green voter: significantly less cosmopolitan and evincing lower levels of political trust.

Keywords:

• Green parties
• Green voters
• political trust
• dimensions of conflict
• the Netherlands
• animal advocacy parties

Notes

1. In fact, the Netherlands and Germany both have a third Green party: De Groenen (‘the Greens’) in the Netherlands, a small deep Green party that has never won parliamentary representation on its own, but has until recently been represented in local and provincial councils; and Ökologisch-Demokratische Partei (‚Ecological Democratic Party‘) in Germany with a more traditionalist policy positions on moral issues, which has also won seats in the European Parliament in 2014 and has local representation.

2. PvdD (2014) ‘Other Animal Parties’ http://www.partyfortheanimals.nl/index.php/home/other-animal-rights-parties/

3. The 2010 data set contains 800,742 users; the 2012 data 757,052 users, and the 2014 data 185,758 users.

4. The analyses presented here were also performed for the variable vote choice. In the 2010 and 2012 DPES, only an extremely small number of voters for these parties is sampled (PvdD 2010: 22, 1%; 2012 28, 2%; GL 2010: 145, 6%; 2012 38; 2%). Under such circumstances the usual logistic regression methods are problematic. Still, the key result of our analysis is replicated, as Appendix 1 shows: PvdD voters are significantly more conservative on cultural issues than GL voters.

5. An inductive Mokken scaling analysis, Automatic Item Selection Procedure for the 2010 and 2012 Election Compass data, yields the very similar results.

6. A full list of items can be found online at http://home.kieskompas.nl/en/portfolio/two-shades-of-green-the-electorates-of-greenleft-and-the-party-for-the-animals%E2%80%8F/.

7. 2010 (0.33), 2012 (0.03), 2014 (0.34).

8. These are arbitrary cut-offs, but the substantive conclusions do not change for other cut-offs.

9. This difference could not be assessed from the probability sample, but only from the sample of VAA users, because no item on animal issues was included in the DPES questionnaires.