The Politics of the Environment: Ideas, Activism, Policy, 2nd Edition

PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS

5.3 How democratic is the ‘anti-party party’?

Does the ‘anti-party party’ contain a paradox?

Do rules that were designed to create a

dynamic participatory democratic party have

the unintended consequence of hampering

internal democracy?

The grassroots democratic APP was built on

the assumption that members will be highly

motivated, committed and active participants.

Rules that institutionalise democratic values in

the party structure, such as rotation and the

ban on joint office-holding, mean that there will

be lots of jobs available throughout the party.

Electoral success meant that Die Gr ̈unen

needed more members to fill more party posts,

but membership remained small at around

46,000. The principle of openness that allows

non-members access to party meetings

reduces the incentive to join the party. Many

who do join, particularly the busy professional

middle classes, leave quite quickly, put off by

the demands of collective decision-making on

their time: ‘The more people taking part in

meetings, and the more meetings strive for un-

animity, the longer – and the more meetings –

it takes to make any decision’ (Goodin 1992 :

140). The limited material incentives to take on

party work – frequent enforced turnover of party

positions, low pay for party officials, continuous

supervision by the grassroots membership –

may have the perverse anti-democratic effects

of reducing the willingness of members to

participate and of driving people out of the

party. Ironically, the APP model may have the

unintended consequence of denying power to

one kind of elite by creating the conditions for

the emergence of a new type of elite: the

minority of people with the time, resources and

endurance to play an active role in the party.

party holds the balance of power. The Hesse experiment was followed by red–

green coalitions in several states (including a three-party coalition with the

liberal FDP). By the mid-1990s, the Greens were actively seeking a coalition

with the SPD at the federal level, which it achieved in 1998. By consistently

working with the centre-left SPD rather than the right-wing CDU, the Greens

were effectively dispensing with the old mantra ‘neither left nor right but

in front’.^2

Despite these reforms, the Greens are still organisationally very differ-

ent from other parties. The gender parity rules encouraging women to par-

ticipate at all levels of the party provide a very visible difference; women

generally make up at least 50 per cent of Green representatives in federal,

state and local legislatures. So, too, does the refusal to have a single leader

and, until recently, the incompatibility rule forbidding dual post-holding in

party and parliament. Whilst the Greens have been quite willing to exploit

theindividual popularity of Joschka Fischer for electoral gain by, for exam-

ple, running highly personalised campaigns, focused on him, in the 2002

and 2005 federal elections, the party activists repeatedly resisted attempts to

give Fischer a formal leadership role in the party. However, in 2003 the Real-

ists finally persuaded the party to lift the strict incompatibility rule. Other

significant differences include the continued openness of party meetings

and the left-libertarian values of the Green membership. The party retains

adistinctive elite-challenging internal culture. Although thelogic of electoral

competitionhas seen the Realists triumph and the Greens enter government,