Green Party

A political party that belongs to the family of the socalled New Politics parties is commonly named a Green party (sometimes also alternative party or ecological party). Such parties were founded in the late 1970s and in the early 1980s in most of the Western industrialized countries. Shortly after their emergence, Poguntke (1987) developed a first theoretical description and definition of the New Politics party family that has found widespread acceptance in the literature. According to this definition, New Politics parties differ from traditional political parties with respect to their programmatic orientation, their party organization, their political style, and the profile of their members and voters.

Poguntke deduced all the specific characteristics of this party family from the central characteristics of the New Politics. The term New Politics is used to refer to the changes in the political attitudes and dispositions of the citizens that result from the process of postmaterialist value change in advanced industrialized societies. The most important change resulting from this so-called silent revolution is the increasing emphasis on quality of life, citizen participation, and self-actualization, while material affluence and economic growth are losing their dominance. As a consequence, there is a change in the dominant lines of political polarization in modern societies.

In their party platforms, Green parties take a stand in favor of New Politics issues like nuclear disarmament, solidarity with the so-called Third World, grassroots democracy, and gender equality. In the early years of the New Politics parties, their most distinctive programmatic claim was giving first priority to ecological imperatives. This is the reason that they often named themselves Green parties. Since adherents of New Politics show a strong emphasis on direct political participation, the organizational structure of Green parties originally differed fundamentally from the internal structure of traditional political parties. A series of measures were taken in order to avoid processes of internal oligarchization and hierarchization: ordinary party members had the right to participate in party meetings at all organizational levels and were directly involved in important political decisions. Elected officeholders were strongly controlled by the rank and files, and their terms of office were limited. The intention was to realize the goal of direct participation of the party members under the requirements of the respective national party law as far as possible. However, despite all these efforts, there was a contradiction between operating as a political party within the parliamentary system and the fundamental preference for a grassroots democracy. Initially, Green parties tried to dissolve this contradiction by becoming active in and outside the parliamentary arena simultaneously. Members and officeholders of Green parties engaged strongly in unconventional political actions like demonstrations, boycotts, squattings, and walkouts. The Parliament was seen as an arena that was only to be used in order to give the political concerns of the Green Movement a greater public visibility. According to this strategy, Green parties initially did not strive for coming into power. During its early days, the German Green Party described this strategy with a nice metaphor: while the extraparliamentary New Social Movements should form the “supporting leg” of the party, the parliamentary work should not be more than the “free leg.” Taking all this together, the political style of New Politics parties can be described as unconventional. The last aspect of Poguntke's definition of New Politics parties refers to the specific profile of their membership and their electorate. He saw the main potential for Green parties among persons with post-material value orientations. According to the available empirical evidence, those persons were predominantly young, highly educated, urban, and members of the new middle classes.

...