This article investigates the impact of niche party success on the policy agendas of mainstream parties. Following from the expected electoral effects of issue politicization, the success of radical ...right and green parties will cause different reactions from mainstream parties. While mainstream parties emphasize anti-immigrant positions in response to radical right success, green party success will have the opposite effect for environmental issues. Since green parties constitute issue owners, their success will make established parties de-emphasize the environment. Analyzing time-series cross-section data for sixteen Western European countries from 1980 to 2011, this article empirically establishes that green and radical right parties differ in their effect on mainstream party behavior and that their impact depends on the ideological position and past electoral performance of the mainstream parties.
Little attention has been paid to the process of members leaving parties in order to support other parties. Party developments in the UK in the 2010s provide an opportunity to analyse the ...determinants of members giving up their current party and joining a rival. We examine this issue using an original panel survey of 2,679 members of the Green Party of England and Wales. Our results show that members who joined the Greens motivated by concern about social justice are more likely to leave and support Labour after Jeremy Corbyn’s election as party leader. Members who joined to protect the environment are less likely to leave. Niche parties can attract members predominantly motivated by issues traditionally represented by a mainstream party but these members are more likely to leave the party again following a position change by the mainstream party.
Socially responsible investing (SRI) is gaining traction in the financial sector, but it is unclear whether the dominant financial logic complements or competes with the social logic in the founding ...of SRI funds. Based on insights we gained from observation at an Asian SRI industry association, interviews with SRI professionals in the U.S. and Europe, and other fieldwork, we questioned explanations for SRI’s conflicted relationship with the financial logic. Our observations prompted us to build a panel database of SRI fund foundings from 1970 to 2014 in 19 countries so that we could examine how a dominant logic interacts with alternative logics to promote or stifle institutional change. We decomposed the financial logic into interdependent dimensions as the provider of means (resources, practices, and knowledge) for novel financial ventures to be founded and the enforcer of profit-maximizing ends that constrain such foundings. Our theory suggests a paradoxical role for the financial logic, which explains an intriguing empirical finding: the founding of SRI funds has a curvilinear, inverted-U-shaped relationship with the prevalence of the financial logic. We propose and find that the relationship between the dominant financial logic and the social logic of SRI shifts from complementary to competing as the financial logic becomes more prevalent in society and its profit-maximizing end becomes taken for granted. We examined how certain alternative logics—those of unions, religion, and green political parties—moderate these effects. Our results shed light on how and to what extent institutional change can occur in fields in which one institutional logic is dominant. They also reveal country-level institutional factors that drive SRI.
The 2021 German Federal Election saw an increasing variation in voting behavior between both age groups and geographic groups. This paper brings these developments together and argues that the ...urban-rural divide is much bigger among younger than among older voters. We combine data from the German Longitudinal Election Study with original survey data and introduce the number of freelance artists at the ZIP code level as a new measure of urbanity. Using this data, we show that the urban-rural age divide concerns cultural attitudes as well as the propensity to vote. While the Greens mainly attract young voters in cities, the AfD performed well among young rural voters, particularly in Eastern Germany. At the same time, the differences between the young and the old are larger in cities than in the countryside. These results suggest that the importance of the urban-rural divide is likely to increase in future elections.
In this article, we propose a new framework to study the success of Green parties that links a consideration set logic with a valence approach. We argue that issue entrepreneurship explains when ...voters start considering Green parties and thus if they win some initial seats, yet it is the party’s perceived competence that explains whether larger numbers of voters who consider the Greens end up voting for them. Using panel data from the German Longitudinal Election Study, we show that finding the climate important is essential to consider the Greens during the 2021 general election campaign. However, because their candidate Annalena Baerbock was perceived as less competent, these considerations did not translate into votes. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of when Green parties can or cannot attract larger numbers of voters.
The 2019 European Parliament (EP) elections produced remarkable gains for Green parties throughout the European Union (EU). We analyse in how far different national electoral contexts can explain the ...electoral success of Green parties in EU member states. On the theoretical side, we argue that an increased salience of EU environmental politics has led to 'green issue voting'. However, the relevance of environmental issue preferences depends on the electoral context in which Green parties compete for votes. Specifically, we expect 'green issue voting' to be most relevant for the smaller Green parties who own the environmental issue. On the empirical side, we test our argument by combining survey data collected by the European Election Study with information on party positions provided by the Comparative Manifestos Project. Our findings strongly suggest that the relevance of 'green issue voting' in the 2019 EP elections was conditionally dependent on the national electoral context.
Can first-hand experience of a climate-related natural disaster make citizens more likely to vote in favour of progressive climate politics? Leveraging the rare occurrence of a large-scale disaster ...just two months before a federal election, we use a difference-in-differences design to study the short-term electoral effects of the devastating 2021 Germany floods on voter support for Germany’s major environmentalist party, the Green Party. Compared to other German voters, those living in areas affected by the floods were marginally (0.4–1.6 percentage points) more likely to vote for the Greens. The largest increases in Green vote share are observed in municipalities which were directly exposed to flooding. Contrary to expectation, we tend to find larger increases in Green Party support in the less severely affected areas. Despite substantial increases in turnout in affected areas, we find that the observed increase in vote share for the Greens was rather driven by a persuasion effect on voters who previously supported other parties. In the absence of evidence that the floods led to an increase in voters’ issue prioritisation of climate change, our results highlight the limited possibility for major natural disasters to induce increased localised support for Green parties.
At the extremes of the transnational cleavage in Western European democracies, voters for far-right and green parties tend to hold polarising immigration attitudes. Yet, the extent to which ...immigration concerns divide mainstream left and right voters, and drive vote-choice at the ballot box for mainstream parties, is under-researched. In this article, I disentangle both immigration attitudes and mainstream electorates to answer these questions. I show that immigration issues divide electorates within the mainstream left and right along educational lines. Yet, the divide between low-educated and highly-educated voters, in particular regarding their cultural immigration concerns, is larger for the mainstream left. Secondly, turning to the drivers of vote choice, I find that cultural immigration issues explain voting for the mainstream right, particularly for lower educated voters, whereas economic concerns are associated with voting for the mainstream left, despite education level. The paper contributes to ongoing debates about immigration issues and voting by recalibrating the academic focus towards mainstream party electorates and internal divisions therein.
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