Does a Rising Tide Sink All Boats Equally? The Dilemmas Facing Green Parties.
- Oliver Haythorne
- Mar 5
- 9 min read
Updated: Mar 7
Green Parties and Power
In some parts of the western world, it’s almost a joke that the Greens - for they always have the same name - are politically irrelevant. They might run a few councils in areas overrun by Bohemian layabouts, arts students, and middle class retirees, but they don’t govern. In most places, they’re losing what meagre ground they do have in the polls. Even where they have grown a bit, like in the UK, they remain small, indignant parties. They’re as often punching bags for the bigger parties as anything else, and only in Germany were they briefly in government. Yet, that went pretty poorly too: the Greens lost around a fifth of their previous support, a whole 3.1%, and are unlikely to be in a new coalition.
For all of this, environmental issues remain highly salient. Most people agree, on some level, that there is anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change. They also agree that we should do something about it. Something. You know, fix it. Stop the problem. Stop the pollution. Not that I’m causing much of the pollution. I don’t fly that often. It’s companies, or billionaires, or the Chinese and Indians, or… whoever. Just not me.
Anyway, if climate issues enjoy such public agreement, why aren’t Green parties that popular? That’s their whole thing. They promise to do things to help the environment. Even if they don’t get into government, the “flanking” pressure of votes going over to Green parties is intended to push governing parties to change policies in order to win voters back. If in the UK around 53% of the public thinks the government is doing a bad job around climate change (with only 26% seeing its efforts as sufficient), then why did the Green Party only get 6.4% of the vote? Sure, you wouldn’t expect 53% dissatisfaction to transform into 53% of the vote in a General Election, but 6.4% seems a bit low.
I hope to explain a little bit of why Green parties struggle so much in elections, given the basic sympathy they enjoy from the general public. At the core of my argument is the idea that environmental policies create what social scientists call a “collective action problem” - one exacerbated by unequally distributed costs. Collective action problems arise when lots of people have to cooperate together in order to get a particular kind of reward. These rewards are usually “lumpy” (I swear, that’s the technical term!), which means that they can’t just be cut up into bits and distributed to individuals according to their input, needs, or demands. Also, they usually arise with large numbers of people. Now, large is hardly a technical term, but you should basically understand that this means “more people than you could manage as friends”.
The difficulty with a “lumpy” reward (or “payoff”, which sounds fancier and more scientific) is that everyone gets it in the end - even if they didn’t contribute to acquiring it. This creates an incentive to be a “free rider”, someone who doesn’t contribute but gets the payoff anyway. A specific example might be a war. Lots of people - soldiers, generals, farmers, industrialists, politicians, and so on - have to cooperate in order to win. Winning benefits everyone pretty much “equally”, at least for the purposes of this example. Yet almost nobody is individually crucial to the war effort. If you’re a lowly grunt, you could just desert, and nothing would change. You’d still get the benefit of winning if your side won, and not if not. The problem is, if too many people think the same way, it can get quite hard to win!
These sorts of problems are not exclusive to environmental policies (though they do seem to be particularly common there). What they are is particularly politically difficult to manage for Green parties. Let’s have a look at the specifics of Green politics.
Taken For a Ride: The Costs of Transport Policy
As we’ve all had drilled into us, travelling in cars (or other motor vehicles) is environmentally damaging. We should walk or cycle instead, or maybe take public transport like the train. (Of course, taking the bus is probably worse for the environment, though this is rarely mentioned.) Since it would be impractical to ban people from driving completely, and of course rather illiberal, the best solution most democracies have found is to tax carbon emissions in cars, often based on model averages. Electric cars usually aren’t taxed, since they’re better for the environment in this respect. The thing is, electric cars tend to be pretty pricey. As such, many people view these taxes as regressive in outcome. Why should I pay when my car’s not such a big deal compared to Taylor Swift’s jet?
In Luxembourg, there’s a tax on Carbon Dioxide emissions, currently sitting at €40 per tonne emitted. A large-scale study - with large financial incentives! - was recently conducted and released through the IZA as a Discussion Paper. It used a randomized survey design to ask Luxembourgish citizens what they thought about this tax - and whether they’d put their money where their mouths are. This involved exposing them to various kinds of information about the tax and its fairness. The participants were divided into three groups. One group was told (truthfully) that environmental policies are often underrated in effectiveness, another was told that revenues from the tax were disproportionately given to less well off people, and the final group was given no information, just asked questions.
After that, they were all asked about their views on the carbon tax - and especially whether they’d be willing to pay more of a carbon tax. People who were exposed to information about the effectiveness of environmental policies were pretty much unaffected, but those who heard about the way environmental tax revenues are (re)distributed became much more positive on the issue. This should be something of a positive sign for environmentalists, and there are more to come.
Part of the design was that people got paid for their participation, and paid a pretty good amount by survey standards - up to €40, plus the chance to win a “jackpot” of €250. A potential €290 payout for one survey really isn’t bad! At the end, the authors asked if each participant wanted to transfer some of their payout into carbon credits - a mechanism to get greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. People who had their opinions of carbon taxes increased by the information they were exposed to turned out to be more likely to transfer cash into carbon credits!
Surely, this is reason for some optimism among Greens. When people are informed about the fairness of environmental policy, they become more likely to support it (at least in the short run). If people are just misinformed about the impact of environmentalist politics, then a bit more campaigning should fix the whole issue. If there’s anything environmentalists and Green parties are good at, it’s raising disproportionate attention to their causes.
The real problem is that this puts Green parties into a rather nasty position. Politically, Green parties have to build rather complex coalitions. They often mix “hardcore” ideological environmentalists, young hard-left activist types, and (especially in the UK) “Green conservatives” (or “Green Tories”): older homeowners with a conservationist streak. This is quite a difficult set of people to triangulate politically. Often, they are forced into campaigning on a milquetoast blend of policies that avoid offending anyone too much - especially the crucial swing “Green conservative” voters. This means avoiding messaging too much on redistribution. In order to energize their base of activists, however, it doesn’t make much sense to advertise on incremental policies like carbon tax increases. Most activists already agree that these policies are fair, effective, and necessary, after all.
This means that there is very little political incentive for Green parties to advertise on what is actually most effective for raising broad public support. After all, the game in any non-proportional democracy is to get focussed support in a few areas, not broad support across the country. Yet, in proportional democracies, the relatively marginal and policy-focussed support that the Luxembourgish study focussed on may not be enough. After all, in almost no democracies do voters vote on individual policies. Instead, they vote on bundles of policy promises in the form of political parties. However, raising support for higher carbon taxes would still be useful for Green parties insofar as it would force other parties to adopt it in their policy bundles in order to avoid losing marginal voters. The question is then whether Green parties are more interested in being policy pressure groups or viable parliamentary parties.
So, this problem might be soluble - the question is one of will. How far is this true of other political problems facing Green parties?
Heated Debates
Another recent Discussion Paper - from which I have shamelessly stolen this fun subtitle - discusses the fortunes of Germany’s Green party, Alliance 90 (or just Die Grüne, The Greens), after a heating policy change was leaked in early 2023. It would have imposed lots of environmentally sensible requirements on Germans’ heating appliances, but requirements that would have cost them both money and convenience. Those costs would have been proportionally highest for the poorest, as is so often the case with environmentally sensible policies.
The leaked policy was so unpopular, it devastated the support of Alliance 90 and their coalition partners. In fact, the backlash was extreme enough that it caused both parties to walk back the policy a bit. When it was finally promulgated, it had been moderated significantly. Germans really didn’t like the idea of having to pay a lot of money for environmental retrofits - even though most of them support the idea of lifestyle changes in response to climate change. This was likely to do with a mixture of perceived unfairness and a sense of being coerced - being forced to do something they would rather choose to do.
Perhaps better messaging would have helped the policy survive in its original form. That would certainly have been good environmentally. Yet, here is a clear demonstration of a core principle of environmental politics. People don’t like being forced to do things. They especially don’t like being forced to spend money. Any government that wants to survive - that wants to have a lasting policy legacy - must find some way to deal with this sense of unfairness.
A lot of research has suggested that an effective way of making people feel less aggrieved by environmental policies is simply to pay them. That’s the conclusion the authors of the Discussion Paper come to: that people must be compensated for their sacrifices. Of course, there are only so many cuts that can be made, only so many taxes that can be raised. That creates a bit of a problem for Green politics. For one, it limits the range of action. As the Tax Policy Associates pointed out around the 2024 UK General Election, the British Green Party’s proposed reforms were basically not costed in any meaningful sense. This is very much part of conventional wisdom - that the Greens more or less just make up their numbers - and it damages their broad credibility. As such, either environmental policy is ambitious or it is successful.
The Problem of Green Politics
Fundamentally, I would argue that Green politics is trapped between two alternatives. Neither is perfect.
Option one: they can choose to focus on getting moderate environmental policies mainstream. There are effective messaging strategies available, but they’re not widely used. Most parties have no reason to focus on environmental messaging very much. Green parties could use their position as a threat to marginal voters in close constituencies, or around proportional thresholds, to force major parties to care more about these moderate environmental policies. This includes promoting slightly more extreme versions in order to encourage mainstream parties to adopt moderate versions in contrast - an approach called the radical flanking strategy. In essence, this would involve deliberately aiming at influencing policy instead of getting power. Especially in non-proportional systems, this would probably result in virtually no Green elected representatives.
Option two: they can choose to focus on actually getting power by promoting policies that appeal to their core voter-base of dedicated activists, students, and Green conservatives. These policies will usually be less “credible”: like the British Green Party’s 2024 manifesto, they may be effectively unrealistic or involve outlandish or unpopular claims. As we’ve seen, many of the more extreme Green policies out there are basically unpopular. There’s often no way to pay but by increasing taxes, which tends to be unpopular. No amount of messaging will change this by much. While this approach will concentrate support (in constituency systems) and galvanize “core” voters to come out and vote, it will lose popular support overall and result in lower overall policy impact.
While parties can tailor messaging to different constituencies to some extent, they can’t adopt two versions of the same policy at the same time. This is where the choice comes in. Moderate versions of a given policy targeting swing voters result in policy impact, but probably less overall turnout and certainly less concentrated turnout. Extreme versions of the same policy targeting a given Green party’s “voter-base” result in more tangible power (for instance over constituencies) but less policy impact (because one or two parliamentarians can rarely do all that much on a national scale).
Green parties have to adopt one or the other. Generally, they have gone for the more extreme versions, trying to get concentrated support that translates into results. The British Green Party has managed to quadruple its number of Members of Parliament - from one to four, to be specific - this way. Fundamentally, however, Green parties are never going to change the nature of the collective action problem posed by environmentalist politics. Everyone wants to free ride, or at least wants control over how exactly they make their lives more environmentally friendly. In order to make environmental policy work, voters must be bribed - and there’s only so much money for bribes.
Recommended Resources
The IZA's discussion of whether environmental preferences translate to support for green parties (Nov 2024)
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