Mimicry or meltdown? On the greening of local new politics parties

By scrutinizing a specific type of local lists - interpreted as a local variant of ‘New Politics Parties’ - this paper aims to give an initial impetus to understanding the internal variations concealed by the all-purpose denominator of local lists. Local New Politics Parties are identified as local policy-seeking parties based on a grassroots democratic and post-material values. Based on a qualitative analysis of three local New Politics Parties their common characteristics, developments and strategies are analysed and clarified. These small parties’ quest for political relevance urges them to adopt office-seeking objectives, also implying a moderation of their profile and a move towards mainstream parties. In response to the increasing organizational costs of public office, as well as to societal changes local New Politics Parties are compelled to look for cooperation formulas with other political actors in the form of local cartels or by affiliating with a national (green) party

How local are local lists? A quantitative and qualitative analysis of local lists in Flanders

Local party systems in Western democracies are characterized by the presence of so-called independent local lists, giving a distinct place-bound flavour to local politics. Moreover, the presence of these local or non-national lists is generally assumed to counterbalance the entry of national parties into municipal elections and considered as an indication for the incompleteness of the party politicisation process. However, political reality suggests that not all local lists are as independent or as local as their label indicates and instead are related to national parties in varying degrees. This paper aims to contribute to a more detailed and refined understanding of these non-national lists. To do so, the first part of the paper develops an innovative and contingent classification model based on local lists’ vertical and horizontal autonomy. Consequently this classification model is applied to all non-national lists in Flanders over two electoral periods (2006 and 2012) allowing to establish the occurrence of the different types of local lists in Flanders. The second part of this paper aims to uncover the rationales of the different types of local lists. Based on a qualitative comparative case-analysis, the cost-benefit assessments relating to vote-seeking, office-seeking and policy-seeking goals of the different types of local lists are explored. This analysis enables to revealing the local causal mechanisms influencing the strategic choices of the different types of local lists and to interpret and clarify the established variation within the large group of local lists in Flanders