Factors affecting green party development: explaining the decline of Green parties in Slovenia.

• Author: Fink-Hafner, Danica
• Position: POLSCI PAPERS - Report

Introduction

Green parties face a number of challenges to achieving parliamentary success. Achieving long term success is particularly difficult. The Irish and Czech Greens, for example, managed to gain parliamentary seats, but forfeited their legitimacy in an unwise government coalition with the right (Jepps, 2010). In Romania, the Green parties achieved early success by taking advantage of a ballot structure which confused voters, thereby securing parliamentary seats without securing legitimacy (Pavlinek and Pickles, 2000: 190-191). By contrast, the Greens in the Netherlands have been a stable faction in the Dutch parliament despite the party system being predominantly determined by the Dutch consociational political system. In the UK, the Green Party only recently entered the House of Commons--although it gained over a million votes across the country it won only one parliamentary seat (Crossley 2015). Furthermore, while it has been argued that Green party support correlates with the shift from a modern industrial society to a post-modern, post-industrial society (Burklin, 1985), this argument is not as applicable to post-socialist East European countries as to West European countries. While both structural and agential factors have been revealed to be critical for new parties seeking to enter parliament (Bolleyer, 2013), there has been little research into the factors affecting the maintenance of parliamentary seats by new political parties in general (Fink-Hafner and Krasovec, 2013) or by Green parties in particular.

So, what factors determine Green party electoral success? Researchers have so far focused only on a limited range of factors which could be generally described as external and internal. It has often been said that electoral rules and party systems (so-called 'external factors') are the primary explanation for the success (or lack thereof) of Green parties, as for example in the case of the UK.

By contrast, the case of Romania suggests a possible manipulation of electoral rules in favour of gaining non-legitimate parliamentary success, whereas the Greens in the Netherlands have succeeded in spite of the country's unfavourable external institutional characteristics. With the exception of a few brief observations (as in the cases of the Irish, Czech and Romanian Greens), this set of factors has not been systematically analysed. Nevertheless, Green parties have been observed to be organisationally fragmented since the early period of Green party development (e.g. Rudig, 1985; Kitschelt, 1989; O'Neil, 2012). Indeed, the role of agency may appear to be critical.

Intra-party conflicts in European Green parties have led to party splits, particularly during their early stages of their development (O'Neil, 2012: 174-175). Furthermore, conflicts among Green parties within a particular milieu (for instance, in the Netherlands during the 1990s) have led to inter-Green party competition which has resulted in a poor parliamentary representation for the Greens (Lucardie, and Vorman, 2008). In spite of this, Green parties have been able to join forces to obtain positions in government, as happened in Belgium in 1999 (Buelens, and Deschouwer, 2002). Since there are clearly various Green party behavioural patterns, it is important to take into account the potential significance of political agency of Green parties (Bluhdorn and Szarka 2004).

Likewise, the window of opportunity for Green party electoral success arising from the recent economic crisis has only been analysed in a few Western countries (Hernandez and Kriesi, 2015). Our analysis aims to offer an insight into the possible strategic uses of the crisis circumstances (such as the decline in the legitimacy of 'ideological' parties in power) which could enable Green parties in a post-socialist context to succeed at the ballot box.

In short, this article tests the often overlooked thesis that the characteristics of the agency within the Green party segment in a given national party system may be a crucial factor in the long-term success or failure of Green parties within that system. Furthermore, we believe this to be a timely contribution, since most Green parties in Europe appear unable to capitalise on the crisis of legitimacy currently facing mainstream parties both nationally and in the European Parliament; they have failed to occupy the gaps in political representation that have opened up.

Our particular focus is on the post-socialist context in which the question remains: to what extent does the post-socialist context affect the development of Green parties? Our thesis is that there is no single answer to this question. Firstly, post-socialist party systems since the 1989 wave of transitions to democracy have been evolving dynamically: some have undergone gradual consolidation; in some cases the party system has been frozen; and in some cases it has been destabilised (Enyedi and Casal Bertoa 2011). Secondly, post-socialist countries have to varying degrees experienced constitutional and electoral engineering (Fink-Hafner and Hafner-Fink. 2009). Both aspects considerably co-determine the opportunities for Green parties to enter post-socialist parliamentary arenas. Furthermore, there is considerable variance in dominant values among post-socialist countries (Listhaug and Ringdal, 2006).

Although in some respects Europeanisation is a factor of domestic developments, we will exclude it as a relevant factor impacting on the national party system. This is because researchers have observed little evidence of Europeanisation having impacted either on national political party politics in general (Mair, 2000; Ladrech, 2002; Lewis and Mansfeldova, eds, 2006; Aylott, et al, eds, 2007) or on Slovenian politics in particular (Krasovec and Lajh, 2008).

Slovenia makes a good case study for analysing the significance of Green parties' political agency for several reasons: Slovenian electoral rules are relatively non-stringent; it has an open party system; while Slovenian society is characterised by a considerable level of post-modern values and post-modern / post-national citizenship compared to other post-socialist countries (Inglehart and Welzel, 2005: 60-63; Hafner-Fink, Malnar and Uhan, 2013). This can evidenced by the emergence of a significant post-modern Green consciousness among Slovenian voters as early as the 1980s (Slovensko javno mnenje 1987: 37-39; Malnar and Sinko 2012).

More illustrative arguments in favour of a Slovenian case study are presented in the following section on the research question and the analytical framework. This will be followed by a brief overview of the factors identified in the literature as affecting Green party developments. Following the case study of the Slovenian Green party segment we will conclude by summarising our findings.

Research question and analytical framework

Our thesis is that external factors (such as electoral rules, the characteristics of competition within a party system, the value orientation of the electorate) are important. However, external factors are neither the only factors nor the decisive factors that determine whether Green parties both enter parliament and endure the long term. The global economic crises which hit Slovenia at the beginning of 1990s and around 2011 cannot in themselves explain the persistently poor electoral results of either the existing Green parties or of the newly emerging Green parties. However, as the early 1990s confirmed, an economic crisis may provide a window of opportunity for old and new parties if their leadership is entrepreneurial enough take advantage of the circumstances. Indeed, not only have new parties with new leaders been able to enter the parliament in the recent circumstances, but they have even assumed control of the government (Slovenia being a case in point with two consecutive pre-term elections in the context of the most recent international crisis). For this reason, we argue that, where external factors make for a more accessible party system for new entrants, and where voters' (Green) values do not radically alter over time, it is the internal factor which best explain either the success or failure of Green parties in a particular national context.

Since Green parties first emerged in Western Europe in the context of the social and political changes peculiar to the 1970s and 1980s, researchers have been analysing the various factors (clusters of variables) that contributed to their emergence and development in this part of the world. As already mentioned, external factors have usually been understood in terms of the various characteristics of the national political environment and, as a rule, the internal factors have included the organisational fragmentation of Green parties. Although our focus is on the post-socialist context, we will analyse the interplay of all three factors. Indeed, we will look at the dynamic between (1) the national political-environment factor and (2) the internal agency characteristics of Green party developments; and also take account of (3) the economic crisis as an intervening factor.

From a methodological point of view, Slovenia offers a valuable case study because its experiences provide an opportunity to study Green party politics in an institutional context that is relatively stable, inclusive and post-socialist, and which at the same time fosters an open party system. As such, it provides a 'natural laboratory' for studying the role of agency in the development of Green parties.

According to the 2008 post-national citizenship index data (composed of protest potential, universalism, international trust, institutional participation, supranational identity and self-direction), Slovenia appeared to be close to the average post-national citizenship index of 21 EU member states, together with Cyprus, Estonia, the United Kingdom and Spain (Hafner, Malnar and Uhan, 2013: 879). When the countries were clustered...