Programmatic Trade-Offs of Green Parties in Difficult Times

Originally considered a single-issue party by some, green parties have emerged as the most successful party family within the group of “new left” parties in many European countries. With the electoral decline of social democracy and the salience of climate change, their electoral base has grown and become more diverse. In addition, green parties are potentially torn between their core issue, climate change, and their broader profile as a progressive left party. To this day, we know little about the extent to which green parties face saliency trade-offs versus zero-sum trade-offs in their programmatic strategies which might be different from those of other parties. Existing research on programmatic trade-offs for political parties has predominantly focused on mainstream parties (social democratic and conservative parties), with the recent innovation of differentiation between saliency trade-offs and zero-sum trade-offs. Saliency trade-offs occur when an issue is important for one voter group but not another, allowing parties to form positive-sum strategies. Zero-sum trade-offs, in contrast, create immediate strategic dilemmas when two voter groups prioritize conflicting policy positions. So far, however, programmatic trade-offs have not been examined for green parties, despite these parties’ growing electoral prominence. The paper focuses on the case of Germany, where the Green party had been particularly successful. It empirically analyzes these questions by relying on a conjoint experiment conducted in Germany in 2025 (n=2500), where respondents were prompted with different green party programs. The study and its findings have broad implications as they help us understand the electoral potential and challenges of new left competitors in the increasingly fragmented party systems of Western Europe.