Essay from the year 2005 in the subject Politics - Political Systems - General and Comparisons, grade: 1,3, University of Nottingham (School of Politics and International Relations), course: Politics and Society in Europe, a comparative approach, language: English, abstract: The emergence of Green parties towards the end of the 1970s was asignificant turning point in the development of party systems in Western Europe.
Most of them had been highly stable after World War II until the early 1970s.
Therefore, in several countries, the Greens were the first to disrupt the stable party
systems of the 1950s and 60s. But why Green parties? And why in the 1970s? And
why were and are the Greens in some European countries more successful than in
others? And why in a few did they almost completely fail?
The aim of this essay is to find answers to the questions mentioned, exploring
whether value change, party strategy or institutions are the best explanation for the
development of Green parties across Europe. Therefore the essay is divided into
two main parts. The first rather small one elaborates in which countries in Western
Europe Green parties have played a more or less significant role in the past thirty
years and in which countries they haven't. This is rather a descriptive approach
answering the question of what is to be analysed in the second part. In this second
more analytical part of the paper, the different approaches to explain the
emergence of Green parties - value change, party stretegy or institutions - are
explored searching for the most convincing one.

[...]