Greening the mainstream: party politics and the environment

Abstract

If the environment becomes the subject of party competition so that mainstream parties compete to be the ‘greenest’ party and move closer to Green party positions that may produce more environmental policy measures and better environmental outcomes. A comparative analysis of the impact of the environmental dimension on contemporary party politics employs the 2010 Chapel Hill Expert Survey and the Manifesto Project empirical data to analyse party positions and issue salience. Green parties still form a homogenous party family characterised by strong environmental, libertarian and left-wing policy positions. Mainstream parties have mostly employed dismissive and accommodative strategies towards the environment, with left-wing parties adopting more pro-environment policy positions than right-wing parties, but with only marginal differences in issue salience that fluctuate over time.

Keywords:

• environmental politics
• party politics
• Green party
• party competition
• party family

Acknowledgements

I thank Derek Bell, Charlie Burns, Sofia Vasilopoulou and three anonymous referees for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. The 1999 and 2002 surveys asked whether more environmental responsibilities should be transferred to the EU.

2. Green parties are gradually establishing themselves in industrialising countries: in Brazil the Greens won over 3% in the last two elections and 15 seats in the National Congress in 2010.

3. For Belgium only Ecolo is included because there are gaps in the data for Agalev/Groen!. The Italian Greens are excluded because they contested recent elections on a common manifesto with other parties.

4. The environmental score used here is a combination of the ‘Environmental Protection’ (per501) and ‘Anti-Growth Economy’ (per416) categories, which measure positive statements about environmental protection and sustainable development.

5. Laver and Hunt (1992) surveyed nine of our Green parties and Benoit and Laver (2006) surveyed 14. Their immigration and social issues dimensions act as proxy measures for libertarianism.

6. The CHES also contains a tax vs. spending question similar to the Laver surveys, which produced a slightly more ‘left-wing’ mean score of 2.7, but similarly identified the Finnish, Czech, Estonian and Hungarian Green parties as centrist (between 4.0 and 4.6).

7. For reasons of clarity, Figure 2 presents country data only for the two major parties and the Greens (and UK Liberal Democrats). The parties included are: Britain - Conservative Party, Labour Party, Liberal Democratic Party; Spain - Popular Party, Socialist Workers’ Party; Germany - Christian Democratic Union, Social Democratic Party, Greens; Austria - People's Party, Social Democratic Party, Green Party; Czech Republic - Civic Democratic Party, Social Democratic Party, Green Party; New Zealand - National Party, Labour Party, Green Party.

8. There were minor mentions of anti-growth (per 416) policies in Australia and Italy.