| Summary: | Through a comparative study of Sweden and Finland with a focus on their respective green parties, the following thesis aims to explain why the swedish green party, Miljöpartiet, performed poorly in the election to the European Parliament in 2019 while most other green parties across Western Europe made substantial gains. Due to the fact that the Finnish green party, Gröna förbundet, were one of the green parties that performed exceptionally well in the EP-election of 2019, Finland was chosen as the comparative case of analysis based upon Mill's Method of Difference as the two countries of Sweden and Finland are similar in many aspects. The succeeding empirical comparison is based on seven hypotheses derived from previous research regarding green parties' road to success in parliamentary systems in general and on the research-discourse of viewing the elections to the European Parliament as a second-order election. The first five hypotheses consists of previous findings in the research regarding that green parties tend to perform well in parliamentary systems in general in countries were economic development i high, unemployment is low, economic unrest is low, the amount of energy produced from nuclear power is high and that it tends to exist a trade-off effect between green parties and parties categorized as being a part of the “radical left”. The last two hypotheses is based on the findings of the research-discourse of second-order elections and consists of that smaller parties tend to perform better in EP-elections at the cost of the voter-share usually belonging to mainstream-parties and that parties that are part of government when the EP-elections are held tend to perform worse than parties that are not. Through the comparison of Sweden and Finland and their respective green parties, the study finds that the first four hypotheses cannot explain the difference in voter-share between the two while the last three hypotheses are of explanatory value. However, the study finds that in order to conclude the degree to which these three phenomena have had an impact on these results, further research is needed.
|
|---|
