Insider Status-Membership Involvement Offer Trade Off? The Case of Green Parties and Environmental Organisations

This article theorises and empirically investigates the membership involvement offer in political parties and interest groups in contemporary democracies, to better understand the potential that these political organisations have in performing the role of transmission belts between citizens and the state. The expectation is that parties and interest groups that become insiders will curtail the participatory opportunities for members in decision-making processes, but that insider parties will offer broader avenues for membership involvement than insider interest groups. We explore these propositions by focusing on two Green parties and two environmental public interest groups in the contrasting institutional settings of Norway and the United Kingdom. Our analysis based on primary case study data indicates that insider green parties maintain more inclusive participatory structures than insider environmental groups. The receipt of state benefits leads to less membership involvement in political organisations, unless the state demands recipients of such benefits to be organised democratically.

Resistance to Mercosur-EU trade deal will persist

Significance In Europe, environmentalist groups and farmers oppose the deal and have growing support among governments and in the European Parliament, in particular as a result of Brazil’s environmental policies. Argentina has adopted an increasingly protectionist stance since the return of Kirchnerism in late 2019, increasing existing rifts within Mercosur. Impacts European civil society and governments will push back on the deforestation of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest under Bolsonaro. Green parties that are on the rise across Europe will demand the inclusion of mandatory environmental clauses before considering the deal. The economic impact of the pandemic could strengthen protectionist demands from European farmers and Mercosur manufacturers.

Mehr als immer nur dagegen? Die legislative Agenda grüner Parteien in Deutschland und Österreich in Zeiten Großer Koalitionen

In order to analyze which topics are used by the German and Austrian Green parties when proposing bills in times of Grand Coalitions, we use data from a content analysis of all bills these parties proposed from 2007-2008 and 2013-2017 based on the German version of the Comparative Agendas Project Master Codebook . In addition, we define green topics as issues that are named in the respective party programs . In Germany, we observe how an oppositional party under pressure goes on to diversify its own thematic profile as well as to increase the share of bills that focus on genuine green topics . This development, however, is not a general trend among green parties . While the share of bills with green topics increased in Germany after the nuclear phase out in 2011, it slightly decreased in Austria . In both countries we observe an increase in thematic variability of the bills dealing with green top­ics . This could be treated as evidence that chanceless bills are increasingly used for creating a diverse but genuinely green profile .