| OCR Text |
Show 19 percentage of the total votes received by a niche party in a national (lower house) legislative election; and (2) the number of seats, if any, that a niche party holds in the lower legislative house. These indicators will be collected for every election year in which national legislative elections are held. The second dimension examines what happens after an election or, in other words, the extent to which a niche party has a more lasting impact reflected by (3) whether and to what extent the top three mainstream parties shift their parties' platform to address the environmental or MCCP issues of the niche parties for the next election. This dependent variable tries to capture an indirect method of influence-change via mainstream parties. Inglehart, writing in the late 1990s, stated, Environmentalist parties are not yet strong enough to govern independently and may never be so; but they have successfully advocated environmental protection policies in each of these countries [Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, France and UK] and have forced the established parties to adopt stronger environmental protection policies in order to compete for their voters. (1997, 243) Almost two decades later, this statement is still largely true, with a few exceptions. In 2015 Latvia, for example, became the first EU member state to elect a Green Party head of state to the position of president (British Broadcasting Corporation 2015) and in May 2016 Austria followed suit, although the election results in Austria have been contested (Connolly, Oltermann, and Henley 2016). In summary, a niche party may achieve electoral success without significantly influencing the governing parties and policy, and likewise, a niche party may have an indirect impact on governing parties while experiencing little electoral success. By analyzing measures of both electoral success and lasting impact, referred to throughout the paper under the joint label of "electoral fortunes," I will be better able to see how |
