Movement Parties As Programmatic Parties: Substantive Gains and the Electoral Success of West European Green Parties

The literatures on political parties and social movements have rarely intersected. This is curious, given the obvious links between some social movements and the political parties they produce. One key question that remains unanswered is why it is that some parties that originate in social movements are better at generating support at the ballot box than others. To address it, this paper examines the electoral success of a prominent group of movement parties – West European Green Parties.

I hypothesize that the electoral success of movement parties is due to the substantive (i.e. policy) gains as well as the procedural gains (i.e. government participation) that they are able to achieve. Having their origin in social movements, these parties are likely to attract supporters that are dedicated to change in policies and thus delivering on the substantive dimension should be the key factor for electoral success. However, I posit that the effect of substantive gains will interact with procedural gains because government participation is the main avenue for accomplishing (policy) change. Parties that are able to deliver on both dimensions are expected to be most successful at achieving electoral gains, while parties that fail in providing substantive gains but at the same enjoy the payoffs of procedural gains should be the least successful.

Based on a dataset of Green Party success for 15 parties in 12 countries spanning the 1971-2007 period and 78 elections, I test these hypotheses with the help of a pooled cross-sectional time series dataset.