Fifty Shades of Green? Political differences between elites, members and supporters of Europe Ecologie Les Verts

ABSTRACT

In recent years, many political parties have created new forms of affiliation and have justified the blurring of membership boundaries with claims that sympathisers would be more representative of the electorate and less radical. Such claims are based on ‘popular wisdom’ inspired by John May’s ‘special law of curvilinearity’, which states that activists hold more extreme views than voters and elites. When this expectation has been tested, results have been at best inconclusive; but testing has so far never used a single survey to compare different groups. Using an online survey of Europe Ecologie Les Verts party members and their extended networks (affiliated supporters, lapsed members, sympathisers), relationships between ideological differences and degree of investment in party activities and decision-making are analysed. The results, contradicting May’s special law along all ideological dimensions other than intra-party democracy, can be explained if May’s narrowly instrumental assumptions about preference formation are rejected.

KEYWORDS:

• EELV
• membership composition
• party allegiance
• ideological stance
• policy views
• membership survey

Acknowledgement

We thank Bruno Cautrès, Colin Hay and Jan Rovny, the editors and anonymous reviewers for their comments and help.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The successes of the voluntary sector convinced a number of parties to develop recruitment strategies emphasising selective incentives (Faucher 2014).

2. The French Parti Socialiste developed a similar network and attempted to promote deliberation beyond the party membership. The British Labour party created Big Talk in 2003 and Your Britain in 2013 and spurred online communities (Scarrow 2014).

3. There are indications that new forms of membership have an impact on younger cohorts in the Australian Greens (Gauja and Jackson 2016, p. 372).

4. These studies predate the 2015 membership surges in British parties.

5. This is not identical but is comparable to the analytic tri-partition of party-on-the-ground, party-in-central-office and party-in-office.

6. As the outcome of the British referendum on membership of the European Union plainly shows.

7. Several studies argue that the complexity of the electoral competition needs to be taken into account, particularly in multi-party systems when exploring the validity of May’s laws (Narud and Skare 1999, Holsteyn et al. 2017).

8. Party ‘misfits’ are rarely studied, though they potentially represent a sizeable proportion of the membership (van Haute and Carty 2012).

9. A national figurehead of the 1968 movement in France and prominent in Die Grünen.

10. A comparison between the constitutions of Les Verts and EELV shows few significant changes in terms of organisation.

11. The membership of the French green party has been surveyed several times (Roche 1992, Rihoux et al. 2002, Boy et al. 2003).

12. Lists of words are used in Cevipof post-electoral studies conducted in the aftermath of the 2007 and 2012 French presidential election (Perrineau 2008, 2013).

13. EELV provided the figure for its membership numbers in 2013.

14. Studies of Les Verts have shown members to be more open than the general public to alternative practices and worldviews, including holistic medicine and Eastern philosophies (Bennahmias and Roche 1992, p. 127; Faucher 1999, p. 42–56). The proximity of green culture to the new age has also often been highlighted (Faucher 1997).

15. These questions were only asked to fully paid-up party and coop members at the time of the survey. Thus, in this case the number of respondents was 4553.

16. They were accused of being ‘Green Khmers’ and eco facists (Ferry 1992).

17. This is not something we develop here but our analysis confirms studies that find few socio-demographic differences (Scarrow and Gezgor 2006, 2010).