Exploring the Stabilization of a Political Force: The Social and Attitudinal Basis of Green Parties in the Age of Globalization

Abstract

About 30 years after gradually gaining parliamentary representation, Green parties have become established political actors throughout Western Europe. Based on a comparative analysis of 12 countries, this study argues that the stability this party family has achieved is the result of an enduring coalition with groups of voters who not only share a particular set of attitudes but also several specific social characteristics. Such a structural perspective clearly contradicts earlier approaches in the literature that primarily explained the Green vote as being issue- or value-based and sometimes simply as representing political protest. Green voters, by contrast, are young, highly educated, work as social-cultural specialists or are students, are predominantly urban, and less attached to Christian churches. These structural components are connected with environmental, libertarian, and pro-immigration attitudes. With respect to new divides caused by globalization processes, especially the latter issue explicitly distinguishes them from other voter groups.

Notes

1. O'Neill (1997), who – ten years ago – provided the most recent comprehensive study on Green parties, does not systematically deal with such aspects. The recently edited volume by Frankland et al. (2008) primarily deals with questions related to party organization.

2. The number of countries is too low to conduct a multi-level regression analysis (see Kreft and De Leeuw 1998: 125).

3. Only in Britain and, interestingly, in Luxembourg more than 10 per cent of this group are members of other faiths.

4. In Austria (round 1) and Britain (round 2).

5. Question: ‘Regardless of whether you belong to a particular religion, how religious would you say you are?’ Respondents were given an 11-point scale from 0 ‘not at all religious’ to 10 ‘very religious’.

6. The other available item in all three rounds of the ESS, ‘modern science can be relied on to solve environmental problems’ (scnsenv), is problematic because it first of all measures trust in science.

7. In the first round of the ESS, no other variable measuring attitudes towards European integration was included in the survey.

8. These two countries are not included in the third round of the ESS (edition 3.1) and, additionally, the variables impenv, ipfrule, ipstrgv, and imptrad were not included in round one. Therefore, the analysis of model II is based on round two only, which heavily decreases the number of observations. Given the by far smaller samples, the application of the full model III is not possible, unfortunately.