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Show 63 more or less attractive coalition partner and can be used to recruit and sustain voters. Hypothesis 18: As a niche party's commitment to its issue decreases (calculated as a percent of the total platform mentions), the electoral success (percent of the vote, number of seats, and movement by mainstream parties on niche issues) will decrease. To illustrate the strategic decisions facing niche parties, I draw on the experiences of France's Europe Ecology-The Greens (EELV). With their entry into a coalition government with the French Socialist Party (PS) following the 1997 election, where the niche party's platform was the most "green" of all its elections, EELV faced both incentives and pressure from its partner to broaden its platform to include other issues central to the PS like education and foreign policy (Cordier 1996, 491). While broadening its party platform may make the niche party a more viable coalition partner, does it come at the expense of its central issue(s), and thus hurt its chances for future electoral success? Broadening, as Europe Ecology-The Greens can illustrate, is a double-edge sword (Müller-Rommel 2002, 10). More specifically, while in office, the party was not only unable to prevent the continued production of plutonium based nuclear fuel, which had been a central tenet of the coalition agreement, but the Minister of the Environment (a member of EELV) actually ended up endorsing the storage of nuclear waste underground (Boy 2002, 68-69). Additionally, in subsequent elections, EELV did slightly broaden its policy platform, and this decline in "nicheness" is noted in Figure 22 from 1997 to 2007. As Boy sums up, "Ten years ago, the press often accused them [EELV] of being unable to propose solutions on anything other then environmental problems. Today they are frequently accused of the reverse, that is, dealing only with social issues and neglecting the environment, which should be their area of special concern" (2002, 73). While this example touches on two aspects of strategy - dedication |
